303 pages
Published 2008
Read from August 29 to August 30
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
I thought I had read this book back when it was new. I certainly had a copy. Upon revisiting it, though, I don't think I made it more than a couple chapters into its sub-technothriller-grade character introductions and technobabble set-up. It just isn't a good book. But I want to power through all the dinosaur fiction I can stand, so let's do our best.
Some things I liked about Cretaceous Dawn: It treats the Late Cretaceous environment as a full ecosystem, with our castaway characters meeting shorebirds, beetles, mammals, and crocodiles long before they see a ground-running dinosaur, and they observe mating before they witness predation. That was neat. The Grazianos also make an effort (small, but appreciated nonetheless) to portray just how uncomfortably hot, humid, bug-ridden, and muddy the Cretaceous flatlands would have been. I love the Cretaceous, but I think mucking about in its coastal swamps would've been miserable.
That said, the Cretaceous ecology the Grazianos portray feels weirdly depleted. I think most contemporary authors (and even a lot of paleontologists) cannot conceptualize the pre-industrial natural world, and the sheer vastness of the biomass our ancestors shared the world with not even four centuries ago. Modern people might see a squirrel, a sparrow, and an owl on a nature walk, and think that's what the world was like before cities and factory farms. The reality would've been closer to endless herds of bison carpeting the hills and flocks of passenger pigeons hiding the sun — the direct opposite of the Grazianos' insistence that you could walk for days without seeing a large animal.
This is a pet peeve of mine, informed by Paradise Found and other looks at pre-industrial ecology. I hope to alter this perception in my own novels, when I finally write them.
What I didn't like about Dawn makes for a much longer list.
The book is rancid with that post-9/11 worship of uniform. One of the marooned characters is a tough, no-nonsense ex-marine, apparently the only member of the group capable of thinking in terms of survival. Even worse, much of the narrative is a modern day police procedural starring a tough, no-nonsense cop who rose in the ranks solely due to her own grit and determination. The '00s loved fellating their goddamn cops and marines.
The cop plot doesn't even add anything to the book, except padding. You could have left it all on the editorial floor and lost nothing.
It would be generous to call the characters two dimensional. They are: Bland Man, Old Man, Tough Man, and Bland Woman. Bland Man is so horny for Bland Woman that part of him wishes they could stay marooned in the Cretaceous forever. When one of them dies, no one reacts much. Clearly, not even the book is that invested in these characters.
The prose improves (or at least gets less obtrusive) once our group lands in the Cretaceous, but it never develops beyond a reheated imitation of airport fiction.
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