Bones of the Earth

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This is an entirely enjoyable read and I do recommend it as a fun diversion.

I gave this book four stars, not to indicate that I do not recommend it, but because the plot - as enjoyable as it is - is oddly unfocused and disjointed. Nonetheless, despite the lack of an essential focus, there are some great ideas in this book that make it a worthy addition to time travel stories.

The story opens with paleontologist Richard Leyster receiving an odd visit from H. Jameson Griffin, who leaves him a fresh dinosaur head. It turns out that we have time travel, but for unexplained reasons, this time travel only involves the age of dinosaurs.

Leyster is enthusiastic but suspicious about this strange revelation. He signs on with a project that involves sending teams back through the Paleozoic to do live research on dinosaurs. The project involves intermixing paleontologists from different eras together at conventions and on projects, although they are very good about not revealing things to one another that happen in the earlier parties' respective future.

Leyster meets a future Gertrude Salley, who seems to have made it her mission to wreck his life. He goes back to the past and is marooned when the “time beacon” that time-travelers depend on to get picked up is destroyed by a radical Creationist Christ sect. Apparently, even after the secret of time-travel is revealed in 2027, fundamentalist Christians not only continue to adhere to their opposition to evolution but become down-right violent about it.

I sighed when I saw this and assumed that we would be treated to an anti-religious, “aren't faith heads stoopid” text. Fortunately, Swanwick doesn't go there. The radical fundamentalists appear and then disappear as the story wends its way through the marooned party, Salley's relationship with Griffin, Griffin's relationship with his future self, and the revelation of where time-travel actually came from.

All in all, it's a fun book, the change of genre from “mole hunt” to “Robinson Crusoe” to alien contact - while all individually good - seemed, as I said, unfocused.

I am sure that much of the dinosaur “science” in this book is made up, which is a pity because I found myself underlining a lot of passages about dinosaurs in the interests of seeing if Swanwick's “science” is BS or grounded in fact. I'm certain that the part about dinosaurs navigating by the movement of the continents is hooey, but - gosh, wow! - what if? We are all at heart, dinosaur nerds and science fiction ought to be about the big “gosh-wow!” moment.

Consider this minor example:

““Let me guess—they were all continuous vortexes, right?”
“Uh ... yeah.”
“So you've just proved that an archie can fly fast, but not slow. Brilliant. It would've taken me ten seconds of direct observation to tell you the same thing.” Birds, with the exception of hummingbirds, which flew unlike anything else, had only two modes of flight—slow and bat-out-of-hell fast. The slow mode left pairs of loop-shaped whorls in the air behind them, while the disturbance of the fast mode was continuous. Slow flight was the more difficult mode to achieve, a refinement of primal flight that wouldn't appear for tens of millions of years yet.
“It was Dr. Jorgenson's experiment. I just helped run it.”
To Monk, he said, “If you're writing a book, that means you're from later in the century than we are. How long do we have to wait before we can publish our work?” “I'm really not allowed to say.”
“This idiot secrecy really screws up everything,” Raymond said sullenly. “You can't do decent science when you can't publish. That's all fucked up. We had a group from the Royal Tyrrell through here last week, and they'd never even heard of our work. What kind of peer review is that? It's nuts.”

There's so much wrapped up in that one passage that seems true and is an interesting comment on science. Is the part about slow flight true? I hope so because I've filed it away as a factoid.

Here's another great tossed-in comment that educates and advances the story, which is the heart of good science fiction:

““Let me put it this way. The biggest difference between the Mesozoic and the Cenozoic is not the absence of dinosaurs, but the presence of grass. Grass changed everything. It has amazing powers of recovery, which made large-scale grazing possible for the first time. Which in turn made animals like bisons and water buffalos possible. And therefore made predators like lions and tigers possible. Theoretically, birds could have evolved to fill the niches their bigger cousins vacated. How come mammals managed to make an end run around birds? Grass! It changed the rules. It made it impossible for the dinosaurs to come back.”

Gosh...wow!!!

It's a fun book. It's worth reading. My subtraction of a star is more of a formal point about novels than it is about whether you should read this book.

Read.

Enjoy.