The Ultimate Dinosaur: Past • Present • Future, edited by Byron Preiss and Robert Silverberg*
343 pages
Published 1992
Read from September 7 to September 9
Rating: 2 out of 5
* Denotes a reread.
It’s impossible to imagine a book like this getting published any time but the early 1990s.
It’s a hefty coffee-table tome that mixes pop science essays on aspects of dinosaur paleontology with short stories from many of the top names in 1980s sci-fi. You’ll find an entire generation of Discovery Channel-famous paleontologists — Philip Currie, Sankar Chatterjee, Catherine Forster — cheek by jowl with the likes of Harry Harrison, Connie Willis, and Ray Bradbury. There are also sumptuous illustrations (though not enough) from Doug Henderson, William G. Stout, and Wayne D. Barlowe, among others.
The result is both a coffee-table book too sparsely illustrated to make a good coffee-table book, and an anthology too unwieldy to read with any comfort. But there was money behind this project, that’s for sure. Bantam Books expected to make bank off of it. Retail price was $35 — in 1992 money. I doubt we’ll ever see its like again.
Which is a shame. Why’d the heyday of dinosaur fiction have to happen in the nineties? It truly was one of the grodier eras of sci-fi.
The essays here are predictably dated. I’ll be honest, I only skimmed most of them. As expected, Sankar Chatterjee trots out his usual “birds secretly evolved from crocodylomorphs in the Triassic, I swear” routine. There’s an entire chapter dedicated to Marsh and Cope’s Bone Wars. Other chapters offer little beyond beginner stuff, like “bird-hipped vs. lizard-hipped” and so on. Paleontology has undergone several revolutions since the early ’90s, and it doesn’t seem like much of the nonfiction end of this book is worth revisiting.
The stories in this book, however, had as much influence on my early writing as
Jurassic Park and
Raptor Red combined
. I first encountered
The Ultimate Dinosaur sometime around 1993, as a 10 year old prowling unsupervised through the stacks of the Amarillo Public Library. I read most of them far too young to understand half of what was going on. But rereading them now, the first time I’ve read these stories all in sequence, has been a process of rediscovering ancient core memories. As a 17 year old in the Y2K era, I titled a story “Surrey @ Midnight” in clumsy, unconscious tribute to “Siren Song at Midnight.” At 19, one of my first attempts at non-linear storytelling was almost identical in structure to “Major League Triceratops.” And of course “Herding with the Hadrosaurs,” via nearly three decades of convoluted evolution, is the distant origin of my own Timeworld setting (see my story
“Across Gondwana’s Heart” in
HyphenPunk).
“Crocamander Quest” by L. Sprague de Camp. I read and reviewed this one recently, in de Camp’s time-hunter collection
Rivers of Time. (That book, bad as it is, was what inspired me to reread this tome at long last.) In that review, I said, “On one hand, I always had a soft spot for this story because it’s one of the few time-tourist narratives that takes us before the classic ‘Age of Dinosaurs’: Reggie [Rivers] and Chandra Aiyar bring their charges to the Triassic…. On the other hand, this is the tale of their firm’s first and only time safari with a ‘mixed’ company of women and men, which reads just about as badly as you might guess.” I’ll be generous and say
C-
“The Feynman Saltation” by Charles Sheffield. This one is a serviceable near-future medical sci-fi piece about a dying artist who gets an experimental cancer treatment and begins to dream scenes from the geological past. There's also a subplot about his doctor beginning to date his sister — which is a bit weird, right? For its time, this is perfectly adequate, though it has little to do with dinosaurs in the end. Maybe C+
“Siren Song at Midnight” by Dave Wolverton. Ah, our first foray into paleo-DNA. In the over-exploited Earth of the nearish future, vast fleets trawl plankton from the sea while, in the deeps below, genetically-engineered “Sirens” fight to keep themselves from starving. It's the kind of intensely nineties future that's full of thumbed commlinks, holo-broadcasts, jacking into the computer network, mem-set, and a capitalized Alliance. BYU alum Wolverton, straining toward his own ideas of Cartagena atmosphere, makes sure to let you know that a Colombian orderly smells of “sweat and beans.” So why is this story in The Ultimate Dinosaur? Our narrator Josephina Elegante has a pet Euparkeria, but otherwise paleo-DNA doesn't play much of a role in this story beyond vibes. Today this reads like reheated leftovers; maybe it seemed better fresh? D
“Rhea’s Time” by Paul Preuss. This story is narrated in the form of a medical case history; the neurologist-cum-hypnotist narrating it can’t help but emphasize the “striking” beauty of Rhea K., as well as the fact that she isn’t wearing a bra in a mountain climbing photo. That feels accurate to male doctors in any era, I suppose. The big twist was pretty obvious to me early on, but in case you don’t want spoilers from a 30+ year old short story, look away: Rhea’s ski accident scrambled her brain waves into recreating the tectonic history of the Earth over the course of twelve months. I imagine Preuss saw the standard “geological history condensed into a calendar year” comparison and thought, “What if this were a hot comatose redhead in a hospital?” The concept is mildly interesting, and there are bits of poetry to be found in the juxtaposition, but the good is outweighed by the narrative choices. D
“Shakers of the Earth” by Gregory Benford. We’ve had two “technobabble in the brain creates subjective experiences of Deep Time” stories, so of course it’s time for our second paleo-DNA story! (Writers in the ’90s had such a limited palette of tropes, didn’t they?) For the maximum ’90s experience, this one gives us a viewpoint from a young Japanese woman playing it cool despite the way some gruff American paleontologist “quickened her body.” I debated whether I should stick an eye-roll emoji here and be done with it. The second half of the story, set five decades later, with cloned Seismosaurus giving rides across Kansas Sauropod Park, is fine, but overall this story is just… there. D+
“Hunters in the Forest” by Robert Silverberg. Desperately conventional “23rd century society has eliminated risk, so a man must travel back in time to Feel Something” bullshit, paired with one of the earliest manic pixie dream girl characters I ever happened to read. I loved this story when I was 10. I’m pretty sure you’d have to be 10 to appreciate it. D
“In the Late Cretaceous” by Connie Willis. Out of every genre writer active in 1992, you’d expect Willis to deliver a solid, well-researched time travel yarn, wouldn’t you? Alas, that is not what we have here. Instead, we get a mildly amusing burlesque of academia, and a still-relevant satire of buzzword-spewing “consultants” hired to slash departments and destroy higher education. Willis manages to maintain loose allegorical parallels to dinosaurs, mainly through the names of the characters (such as the sharp-toothed consultant Dr. King) and recurring motifs of extinction, predation, and evolution. This went far over my head as a tween. Rereading it now, I find it adequately entertaining and fully Willisian, albeit well outside the scope of what I’d expect to read in a dino anthology. B-
“Major League Triceratops” by Barry N. Malzberg. God, I thought this story was the artsiest shit ever when I was a tween. I didn’t understand half of it at the time, but I fully recycled its nonlinear structure (and the Dollar General Cormac McCarthy affectation of leaving out the quotation marks) in my late teen years. Rereading it now, you get slimed by ’90s excess from the very first page. We open with a grody hetero age-gap relationship and the au courant fetishization of a part-Japanese woman, who knows the man doesn’t listen to her. To better condescend to her, he shapes his words into haikus. And then she asks that they go home to fuck. Beyond that, this story tries really hard to be literary, spitting stream of consciousness couplings that sometimes even work, but more often trip over themselves into grandiloquent yammering about some white dude feeling unfulfilled ennui even in the latest Cretaceous. Every man here is serious and existential, every woman air-headed and horny. (One of the women is actually named Muffy.) This was what pretended to be high sci-fi literature at the time, I suppose. Glints of promising prose aren’t enough to save this from its utter lack of having anything interesting to say. All those years I spent emulating this style were built on nothing but muck. D-
“Herding with the Hadrosaurs” by Michael Bishop. More than anything else, this story (and its accompanying artwork) has dominated my writing subconscious for the last thirty years. This isn’t to say it was good. I was absolutely overwhelmed by this story as a wee tween; I spent an inordinate amount of time poring over the painting of a bow hunter, gone mountain-man in the Cretaceous, smoking a pipe atop a dead Corythosaurus. My Timeworld setting has passed through countless permutations over the decades, but ultimately it all goes back to this story and that image. More so than any other story here, I’ve revisited this one over the years; I knew ahead of time that it doesn’t stand up under the weight of nostalgia and adolescent fixation. It feels tossed off on a deadline. Our narrator’s parents are named Pierce and Eulogy in the first paragraph; in the next he writes that their loss “pierces me yet,” and that this story serves as their “eulogy.” That’s some first draft placeholder shit, you know? But that didn’t matter to my younger self. I saw myself and my brother, itinerant and often living in a car, in the siblings at the center of this story, orphaned when their dad drives their New Studebaker wagon through the time-slip into the Late Cretaceous. I yearned to escape our father and follow corythosaurs on their migrations. And honestly, out of all the fiction here (with the exception of Connie Willis’ story above), “Hardosaurs” has aged with the most dignity. Though maybe that’s my nostalgia talking; it certainly has its share of iffy business. B-
“Besides a Dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?” by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury, of course, was a big name to score for any anthology — big enough that he skated into The Ultimate Dinosaur with its only reprint, a story originally published in 1983. It’s exactly as Bradburyan as you’d expect: Midwestern fabulism rooted in an idyll of white middle class 20th century childhood, full of the tender-sweet bruises of loss and that childhood summer night feeling that nothing is in your control. B+
“Unnatural Enemy” by Poul Anderson. Rote “nature red in tooth and claw” stuff, nothing especially interesting. In typically Andersonian fashion, this story grunts and throbs with masculine fantasies of mating season, of battling other males, the victor rutting as he pleases. (Even here in the Late Cretaceous seas, every named character is male.) It could almost be one of Anderson’s turgid Viking fantasies. I will note that this was my first exposure to fiction told from the perspective of prehistoric animals, pre-dating my first read of Raptor Red by a couple years. Raptor Red is a feminist masterpiece in comparison. D-
“Dawn of the Endless Night” by Harry Harrison. Standard stuff about intelligent, society-building reptiles struck down by the terminal Cretaceous asteroid. Nothing much to note beyond that, aside from my distaste for the old trope of “this alien society was biologically engineered into its hierarchy.” At least it’s a step up from the previous story. C-
“The Green Buffalo” by Harry Turtledove. Closing out with the de rigueur tale of a living dinosaur in the Wild West. Of course Cope and Marsh are involved. More indirectly than they were in Sharon N. Farber’s “The Last Thunder Horse West of the Mississippi” (read and reviewed
here), but still, this is basically the same story, retreading the same plot with less panache four years later. The way Joe and the other hunters pass from dusty 19th century Wyoming into the verdant Cretaceous found its way into a lot of my teenage time-slip writing, though.
C
And that’s it for the stories! Overall, about what I expected. I’ve carted this copy with me through many moves over the last two decades — it still has the sticker from the used bookstore where I purchased it in 2003. It feels weird to have revisited it at long last. Nostalgic, of course, but also the usual icky feeling stirred by so much of ’90s sci-fi. I’m definitely carting it along with me in future moves, too, though who knows if I’ll ever read it again. Maybe I’ll revisit “Herding with the Hadrosaurs” again in a few years.