Bones of the Earth
Michael Swanwick
383 pages
published in 2002

[1]: I'm buggered if I call them Apatosaurus...

I've never really "gotten" Swanwick before. I've tried his early novels like Stations of the Tide and could never finish them. Nevertheless, since Bones of the Earth combines two of my obsessions, time travel and dinosaurs, I thought I'd give it a try. I'm not sorry I did, as this was quite an impressive novel.

Richard Leyster is working on the first major breakthrough of his chosen career as a paleontologist, his discovery of an intact set of footprints showing a Brontosaurus [1] being stalked by a pair of Allosaurus. It is the kind of discovery that can keep a paleontologist busy and haappy for months if not years and yet this stranger named Griffin who walked into his office expects him to drop it to come work for him? A laughable proposition, until Griffin takes a fresh Stegosaurus head out of the cooler he brought along...

From there on, things get complicated... When Richard goes to his first time travel conference, when it's still a secret, he gets into a confrontation with one Gertrude Salley, who he meets for the first time and dislikes immediately, even though it is clearly not her first meeting with him... Further complications arise because of the machinations of fanatical Creationists further up-time, after time travel has gone public, who attempt to sabotage the expeditions to the time of dinosaurs, in their view only some 3,000 years or so ago, before the biblical Flood. And then there is the question of where the time travel came from...

However, the majority of the novel is more picaresque than following any plot, more interested in exploring what it would be like to be back in time, when Brontosauruses ruled the Earth. Not that the plot isn't important, but do not expect an action-adventure story; the thrills in Bones of the Earth are more intellectual.

Because ultimately, this novel isn't about time travel or even about dinosaurs perse; it's about the love of science, the thrills of scientific discovery, about what drives people to spent their lives studying not just dinosaurs, but one particular species of dinosaur. And though you would expect this to be a subject that is explored often in science fiction, it is actually quite rare. For some reason, most science fiction writers seem to be more interested in the products of science, than in writing about the process of science. Which makes Bones of the Earth a blast of fresh air.

In all then, I quite enjoyed this and would recommend it to anybody who likes science fiction.