215 pages
Published 2020
Read from October 29 to October 30
Rating: 0 out of 5
How in the hell does a book like this have hundreds of glowing reviews? As of October 29, it has 221 ratings on Goodreads (averaging 3.9 stars) and 366 on Amazon (4.2 stars). For comparison, another indie press dinosaur novel, Raptoriva, has 50 and 4 ratings, respectively. And Triassic is so, so much worse than Raptoriva.
Hell, Dinosaur Summer, one of the best dinosaur novels published in our lifetime, only has 184 Amazon ratings, for an average of 4.1 stars. Rated worse than Triassic??
Something’s fishy here. Bots? Astroturfing? A positive review bomb by ideologically aligned Redditors? Or is this actually what straight white men like to read?
I have a personal rule not to badmouth indie press books, but Triassic is a special case: it sucks. It physically pained me how awful this book is. From the first page, I wanted to toss it in the garbage and never think about it again. (Donating it would mean inflicting it on others.) I only persevered because my own long-brewing Deep Time universe has some incidental elements in common with Carver’s setting, and I never want anyone to say I borrowed a single thing from this trash heap.
The book begins with two pages of small type laying out the most trite, paint-by-numbers exposition you can imagine. (It even takes the time to specify that bots is short for robots, in case anybody in the audience hasn’t encountered pop culture since the Eisenhower administration.) We don’t get the first hint of a character until near the bottom of the second page. The first character you could consider a point-of-view doesn’t show up until page eight. That’s seven whole pages (dense pages! of small type!) you could have cut from the opening alone, without losing a thing. The rest of the volume isn’t any better.
Triassic’s only distinguishing feature is its titular setting. You just don’t see the Triassic period that often in dino fiction. The only other story I’ve read that visits it is de Camp’s “Crocamander Quest” (which I read and reviewed here). In keeping with the tenor of the book, only a token effort is made to ground Triassic in the actual Triassic period. Coelophysis trails our heroes in movie-monster packs led by an “alpha male.” Grass somehow shows up some 140 million years before its origin. Postosuchus, perhaps the most cinematic adversary the Triassic has to offer, is nowhere to be found.
In terms of story and characters, Carver presents us with bottom-of-the-barrel military sci-fi, scraped from the dregs of a 1960s issue of Analog. There’s an unmistakable stink of, shall we say, a John Campbellian worldview here, a drably masculine fantasy of hard, muscular, interchangeable men solving problems with big guns.
Carver nods to his sophisticated 21st century audience by giving us a straight man’s idea of a woman as well. Yes, one solitary woman. One of her first actions is to catch her own reflection and smile because hypersleep has kept her youthful. She keeps thinking about how young and attractive she is as she explores the ruins of the spaceship that contained the last survivors of the human race (“Still 32 and a knock-out!”), because women be vain, am I right, fellas? And don’t worry, she won’t be emasculating any important male characters, because she has a smaller gun. Inevitably, she becomes a damsel in distress, abducted by a rival male for her reproductive faculties.
I’m not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that the time travel epics I scribbled in my early teens would, with just a touch of editing, be better written and more engaging than this book. Certainly my character work and dialogue was already at a higher level than this.
I could have done anything else with my life rather than read Triassic. At least you won’t have to make the same mistake.
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