2023 read #134: Time Safari by David Drake.

Time Safari by David Drake

278 pages

Published 1982

Read from November 13 to November 15

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

I didn’t expect great things going into this pulpy fix-up. I learned about it through a review on the Prehistoric Pulp blog, which offered at least marginal encouragement, calling it “a fun little book.” But the tagline on the back cover — “Hot blooded dinosaurs and cold-blooded women don’t mix on Time Safari” — was unappetizing, to say the least.

Safari glues together three novellas: “Calibration Run,” which deposits our manly hunter Vickers with a small team in the Pliocene Levant; “Time Safari,” an expansion of a story originally published in 1981; and “Boundary Layer,” which inevitably brings our heroes to the end-Cretaceous extinction — or, rather, our heroes bring extinction to the Cretaceous. 

We make it seven pages into “Calibration” before Linda Weil, team paleontologist and medic, must politely discourage some sexual harassment from a married man in the time-camp. (Later, this married man calls her a slut. Because that’s the kind of book we’re dealing with here.) Somehow Drake’s narration is even more ammosexual than L. Sprague de Camp’s in “A Gun for Dinosaur,” which was Drake’s obvious inspiration. Guns and calibers receive more description than poor Linda Weil does.

“Calibration” is some silly melodrama about Linda Weil wanting to catch a hominid to take back to the modern era for study, and the clash of personalities within their team at the news. Drake's descriptions of the Pliocene are pretty good. The story has some nice little details, like the hominid group foraging honey from a hive. However, “Calibration” is loaded with antiquated assumptions of hominid behavior: the males are providing for everyone else, led by a single alpha male, etc. Modern woman Weil, by contrast, is depicted as willing to endanger their future timeline in her eagerness to prove herself. Conscious or not, the juxtaposition reveals something about the author’s attitudes.

The Late Cretaceous “Safari” maintains a similar mix of well-described paleo-environments and dubious old gender norms. It has a stock complement of characters for a dino-hunt tale: the arrogant rich guy; his dissatisfied wife, Adrienne, who makes eyes at the guides; the pair who only want to take photographs; and so forth. It’s nothing de Camp wouldn’t write five times over in the early ’90s.

At least the dinosaurs are interesting. This might be the earliest story I’ve ever read that featured a pack of sickle-clawed raptors (here referred to properly as dromaeosaurs, because Jurassic Park hadn’t popularized “raptors” yet). The rest of the Cretaceous fauna is consistent with the early years of the Dinosaur Renaissance. The smallest theropods even sport feathers! The dinos, alas, rarely get more than a moment to shine before Vickers and his crew blast them to smithereens. (Literally — someone brought a grenade launcher.)

If you thought the “Safari” would not end with Vickers and the newly widowed Adrienne fucking immediately after her husband and a bunch of other people died in the jaws of theropods, you don’t know what kind of book this is.

The final segment, “Boundary,” gets deep into the weeds with its geopolitics plot — Israel and the Arab states are on the brink of a nuclear war, a proxy front where the Cold War threatens to turn hot. At this distance, it’s hard to tease apart the mainstream 1982 American zeitgeist from specific antisemitic and Islamophobic attitudes the author might have held. Why is any of this in a book about manly men gunning down dinosaurs? Well, you see — I don’t care enough to type it out. The point is, I didn’t like the vibe of this part of the story. It reminded me too much of Dan Simmons’ Olympos. Was this just how Americans thought things stood in the balance at the time? Maybe. I wasn’t quite born yet, so I don't know.

It was around this part of the book that I realized: this is that David Drake. The Vietnam vet who squeezed a career out of military sci-fi and collaborated with John Ringo. Yikes.

The rationale for the Arab vs Israeli plot is to draw an obvious parallel between Mutually Assured Destruction and the extinction of the dinosaurs. (It was so obvious, I typed that sentence the moment nuclear weapons were mentioned, and never needed to edit it.) In their desperation to placate the asshole who’s currently the American Secretary of State, here on special invitation from the Israeli Prime Minister, Vickers and Adrienne inadvertently introduce the pathogen that destroys the dinosaurs. The connection is clumsy and doesn’t make for a satisfying story, but it’s there.

This book could have been so much better without the relentless slaughter and the ham-fisted attempts at geopolitical commentary. But since that’s like 85% of the book, there isn’t much to salvage.