Dinosaur Summer

Greg Bear's Dinosaur Summer is a follow up to the old The Lost World a novel written by Sir Author Connan Doyle, taking place in 1947.

After Professor Challanger returned from the Lost World, there were a lot of follow up expeditions and dinosaurs were taken back to civilisation, where they where put in zoos and displayed in circuses. The public loved it, but that was then and this is now … well, I mean this is 1947 and nobody really cares about dinosaurs anymore. The last dinosaur circus is going bankrupt, but luckily some movie and magazine people want to squeeze the last story out of the dinosaurs, by bringing them back to the Lost World, whereby Bear time displaces the Release Willy idea by fifty years (you know the movie-whale that they spend a couple of millions releasing to its "natural habitat"– when they could have sold it to the Japanese or Norwegians and made a buck on it instead). Anyway, in this story the idea doesn't seem quite as soft headed, as it did with the whale.

Bear has written a compelling boy-scout story, which may seem a bit too young-adult'ish at times, but besides that it's quite interesting and lots of fun. Bear manages to stay away from the obvious Jurassic Park idiocies and manages to write the entire book without putting one single T. Rex in it. He even manages to do some musings on what kind of impact the discovery of dinosaurs will have on our society (like the movie King Kong failing terribly – who want's to look at a rubber ape when there are real dinosaurs?). I'll try to keep this book around and force it on my kid when he/she is ten or twelve.