295 pages
Published 1984
Read from November 10 to November 11
Rating: 1 out of 5
Somehow, six years elapsed between the publication of Dinosaur Planet and Dinosaur Planet Survivors. The first Planet ended halfway through its story, a cliffhanger which found our heroes entering cryogenic sleep to wait out the heavyworlder mutiny that had ended their survey of the mysterious world. Six years is a surprisingly long turnaround time, given how little care McCaffrey put into the original book (which, until I had the misfortune of reading The Land that Time Forgot, was the worst dinosaur novel I’d ever read). You’d think she could have tossed off a conclusion in six months if she wanted to. Does any sign of effort make its way into the belated sequel?
Forty-three years have elapsed since the heavyworlder mutiny. Our bland protagonists Varian and Kai are awakened from cold-sleep by a Federation alien whose only interest is recovering ancient survey equipment from millions of years ago. That secured, it abandons them again. Soon, the survivors learn that the heavyworlders have proliferated for two generations, building a violent and muscle-bound society of dinosaur hunters in loincloths. And the colony has extended an invitation to space pirates to come settle and bolster their gene pool.
Dinosaur hunters! Space pirates! Sounds like it should, at the very least, be some silly pulpy fun, right?
Nah.
Most of the same issues I had with Planet persist here. Varian, the supposed animal lover, wants her sacrifice to mean something — as in, she desperately wants the Federation to swoop in and stripmine the prehistoric planet, which the narrative somehow construes as virtuous, even while it disparages how the heavyworlders are “raping” the planet. Weird eugenicist vibes continue, but honestly that’s true of most sci-fi written by certain generations. Same with the “I can’t help but respect industrious colonists” shit.
Worst of all, there continues to be a dearth of dinosaurs on this planet. We don’t get any kind of dinosaur encounter until page 62, and even then our viewpoint Varian is flying around observing the action. Somehow that’s the closest engagement we get with dinosaurs in the entire duology. We spend more pages discussing the bad taste of a medicinal moss than we do encountering dinosaurs. Rather than the mineral prospecting that filled the first book, here the bulk of the narrative shifts to wrangling over which group has the “lawful” claim to the planet, which is exactly as riveting as it sounds. Survivors is relentlessly dull — which is quite an accomplishment for a book that promises a literal planet full of dinosaurs.
The best I can say is that McCaffrey’s prose might be like 5% better here than it was in Planet. Survivors still reads like a starships-and-jetpacks chapter book, or maybe one of the lesser Star Wars expanded universe novels; it would take just a few tweaks to turn this into Young Jedi Adventures: Marooned on Dagobah! (That hypothetical book probably would've been more entertaining, actually.) Overall, though, there’s less technobabble and fewer acronyms thrown in to make it sound science-fictiony. Not much of an improvement, but it was appreciated.
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