301 pages
Published 2006
Read from November 15 to November 21
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
I remember seeing this book on display at Borders shortly after its release. Dinosaurs! Right there on the cover! And in hardback, no less. (Hardback sci-fi imparted a cachet of quality to my naive younger self. Thirteen years of mass market paperbacks will do that to a budding sci-fi fan.) When I flipped through the prologue, though, I got discouraged by Stirling’s Burroughsian pastiche, and never picked it up again. Soon enough, I forgot it even existed.
Once again I have the Prehistoric Pulps blog to thank for bringing this book to my attention. Their review warns that this is a “by-the-numbers” Old Venus adventure novel, and that dinosaurs are mere “window dressing” without any substantial role. But I’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel for more dinosaur fiction, and in the years since I first spotted The Sky People in the wild, I’ve come to a much finer appreciation for modern takes on Old Venus and Old Mars. (Hell, I even published one.) How does People suit my current sensibilities?
It’s… not great? Stirling is a journeyman sci-fi writer who tends to throw away the promise of his pulpy setups with forgettable storytelling. He hits that elusive note of mediocrity that’s so hard to push through (or care about); somehow he makes a perilous airship journey through skies beset with predatory pterosaurs feel flat and uninteresting. Marauding Neanderthals armed with AK-47s are somehow monotonous. The dinosaurs, moreover, feel more like big, dumb, lumbering, lethargic beasts here than they did in Time Safari, which was published 24 years before.
On top of that, Stirling has that white-guy-who-came-up-in-the-’90s attitude toward his characters’ race. He’ll make a Black woman one of his main characters, and act like he’s being progressive, but then have her spend the book constantly thinking about or referencing how dark-skinned she is. “I’m not equipped to blanch, but consider it done,” says our Cynthia. This could also serve as an example of Stirling’s skills with witty and naturalistic dialogue. Later, we learn the indigenous Venusians have christened her “Night Face.” This tendency in Stirling’s work is pretty glaring.
The main problem with updating a Burroughsian pulp vibe without deconstructing the Burroughsian pulp vibe is, your narrative can feel laden with a 1900s colonialist mentality. In the author’s note to some other book he wrote, Stirling chided his readers not to conflate what a character thinks with what the author thinks, which is a fine philosophy, but doesn’t justify choosing to write a square-jawed protagonist who advises his protégés to gun down “threatening” locals without compunction.
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