213 pages
Published 1978
Read October 20
Rating: 1 out of 5
I’m deep in the weeds searching for new-to-me dinosaur fiction.
My expectations were less than zero for this tale of a red-blooded American man turning entrepreneur when his dog discovers “time roads” in his backyard. Hell, I had a copy of this book once before, during the same era that I first read Dinosaur Planet. I couldn’t even finish it back then. Not an encouraging sign.
Unsurprisingly, Mastodonia is not good. The prose is flat, and characterization next to nonexistent. The dialogue is stiff and improbable; every character launches into exposition, or their life story, after a single swig of beer. Asa Steele, our narrator, was an academic archaeologist but now putters around a farm in Willow Bend, Wisconsin, drawn here by the belief that an ancient crashed spaceship lurks in the neighborhood. Rila Elliot, with whom he shared a fieldwork fling twenty years ago, has gotten into the import-export business, meaning she sells dubiously obtained fossils and artifacts. Rila just happens to show up back in Asa’s life when his dog starts bringing back fresh dinosaur bones and Folsom spears. (If you expected some kind of angle behind Rila’s arrival, or any kind of interpersonal conflict that arises between them in the third act, you overestimated the level of plotting that went into this book.) A local “simpleton” named Hiram, a stock character straight out of a Stephen King novel, right on down to his magical ability to communicate with animals and aliens, also gets involved. It’s very much 1970s_sci_fi.txt.
As you’d expect from such an intensely mediocre novel from such a mediocre time, the narrative expresses admiration for the “pioneer attitude.” Much of the book is the investment capital prologue to “A Gun for Dinosaur” that no one asked for. You expected a time travel adventure book? Surprise! It’s all about capitalism. All too many pages are spent talking about the pecuniary benefits of having a local time-warp outside a small town. Noble-hearted lawyers want to protect our heroes from the perfidious IRS; the Mastodonia of the title originates as a primordial tax-shelter. It’s rather tiresome.
Presaging “In the Upper Cretaceous with the Summerfire Brigade,” there’s even a subplot about deporting the nation’s poor and hungry into Deep Time. Unlike “Summerfire” author Ian Watson, Simak doesn’t specify which ethnic groups should get chucked into the Miocene, but he does depersonalize them by referring to “the ghettos.” Asa and Rila vow to scuttle their entire operation rather than open Mastodonia up to “those mobs.” The ending is the nadir of the individualism fetish in 20th century sci-fi: rather than share a pristine Pleistocene world with inner-city poor, our country boy hero Asa taps into his masculine specialness and finds he has the ability to open up new time roads all on his own. (You could probably sense my eyes rolling all the way from the Cretaceous.)
There are nice little touches here and there — the hepatica flowers Asa notices when he first walks into the Pleistocene; the general vibe of the mobile home they set up in Mastodonia, with its whippoorwills and flowering crab-apples and resident mastodon bull hungry for carrots. Such moments are far too few, however, to make up for the dull boilerplate of the rest of the book.
No comments:
Post a Comment