I Read Books: Dinosaur Summer
I guess this makes it dinosaur week on the blog.
Greg Bear takes as his starting point Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World (not the Michael Crichton book of the same name) – that there is an enormous plateau in remote Venezuela with dinosaurs and other ancient forms of life. Some dinosaurs were brought down but later it was closed off.
We find ourselves in 1946 and the last dinosaur circus is closing. In a surprise move, they’ve arranged to take the dinosaurs back. Of course the political situation in Venezuela is precarious. The army don’t want the local Indian tribes going on the plateau (a rite of passage for chiefs, mystics and warleaders).
Inevitably things go wrong and our heroes find ourselves trapped on the plateau. Almost a hundred years on from Conan Doyle we have a different understanding of dinosaurs, and also the native peoples of Venezuela, which Bear brings to, um, bear on the novel.
There’s an alternate history of monster films as well, what with real live dinosaurs existing; Ray Harryhausen and other Hollywood folks are involved with the expedition.
Read This: Dinosaurs! Also a mixture of real and fictional explorations of Venezuela.
Don’t Read This: Half the book is just dealing with dinosaurs and getting to the plateau.
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