Bones of the Earth (Mass Market Paperback)

There's a lot of story packed into this book and no space is wasted on waffle. As well as the central topic of the book: the time travel and the study of dinosaurs, some credible philosophy and psychology helps the book to sparkle. It's well written, the characters are nicely rounded, believable and likeable. The ideas are interesting and plausible. I'm not a scientist so the suspension of my disbelief was easy. The previous reviewer, hyperpat, whose excellent review made me want to read this book, had trouble with the notion of telephony in the prehistoric world. I'm fortunate enough to know too little to make that seem problematic. The 'Ptolemy Surveyor Launch System' was designed to be operated by just 3 people, to get an orbital survey satellite into the sky above the ancient earth. They had solar powered gizmos. No operator services, like directory enquiries were required. Ignorance is bliss when reading sci-fi. I've swallowed more indigestible ideas than this. Michael Swanwick made me believe. I did find it a challenge to keep track of the time-lines and the same characters popping in and out of the story at different ages, but it's manageable.

Michael Crichton has a rival in the field of dinosaur fiction. I enjoyed this book as much as I enjoyed his Jurassic Park.

A good premise for a novel, and Swanwick does a good job of developing both the situation and his major characters. Thematically, Swanwick looks at the reasons people work beyond that of merely surviving, and the lengths some people will go to, including murder, due to their obsessions with some form of ‘belief’ system (in this case, the major players are the Creationists and federal bureaucrats). It is the conflict between belief systems that leads to the major story action, leaving a party of scientists stranded in the far past and forced to learn how to survive in this environment without most of today’s technological marvels, while another group works to rescue the party by working into the very far future – which has its own surprises.

But there are a few problems here. For anyone other than a paleontologist who is highly familiar with the various classes and species of dinosaurs, a lot of the description of these animals will seem to be couched in almost impenetrable scientific terms (quick, off the top of your head, what’s a ‘hadrosaur’?). Then too, the long period when the existence of time travel was supposedly kept secret, even though there are literally hundreds of people who are engaging in it, stretched my ‘suspension of disbelief’ quotient. The use of cell phones in the distant past also bothered me – how is such a network initiated and controlled without all the infrastructure of wireless systems? Close attention must be paid to the various time-line trip directions and actions, else the conclusion of the book will make little sense – and time-altering paradoxes are known for creating mind- warping headaches.

In the end, though, the above problems are comparatively minor when compared to the strength of his characters and the multiple ideas, such as a new theory about both the social organization of dinosaurs and the reasons for their extinction, that Swanwick presents. A thinking man’s book, written in a field replete with mass-market blockbusters most of which don’t even know what science is. It’s nice to able to read something that doesn’t insult your intelligence and still tells an engaging story. It’s easy to see why this book was nominated for the 2003 Hugo Award, and in fact I think this book is better than the book that won, Robert J. Sawyer’s Hominids (though not as good as another nominee, China Mieville’s The Scar).