11 February 2016

Review: Dinosaur Summer by Greg Bear

Hardcover, 325 pages
Published 1998

Acquired March 2008
Read September 2014
Dinosaur Summer by Greg Bear
illustrations by Tony DiTerlizzi

This is a weird book: a YA novel by a hard sci-fi author that's a sequel to Conan Doyle's The Lost World (it's set about thirty years later) featuring a number of mid-century special effects artists as characters. I mean, what? Basically after The Lost World (for some reason, The Poison Belt and The Land of Mist don't seem to be canonical here), dinosaur circuses became popular, but now they're not, and the main characters have got to return some of them to Challenger's South American plateau. Our protagonist is a boy whose father is a photojournalist documenting the trip.

Putting aside the weird premise (like, who was the target audience of this imagined to be? or was Bear big enough to just do whatever he wanted?), it's actually just a boring book. I felt like I waited its whole length for something interesting to happen. 300 pages is longer than he has ideas for. And how could anyone get tired of the dinosaur circus after just 35 years?

Tony DiTerlizzi's illustrations are really nice, though.

No comments:

Post a Comment