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Many of the stories in
this collection revolve around science lessons of one sort of
another. We’ve had lectures on the sub-atomic world in Out of theSub-Universe, cellular biology in The Eternal Man and The Coming ofthe Ice, and astronomy in The Voice From the Ether; scientific
principles are more subtly laced through The Asteroid of Gold but the
story still provides a decent grounding in the physics of gravitation
and space-travel.
This didactic element
is one of the key parts of what I think of as ‘real’ science
fiction. The story needs to outline the science that surrounds the
plot, and it can’t help but be somewhat pedagogic. It was one
Gernsback’s original motivations for publishing ‘scientifiction’
and maybe it’s why my school years were packed with those junior SF
anthologies stocked with Golden Age stories like these.
As the title implies,
this one gives us a Walking With Dinosaurs-style glimpse into the Jurassic
age.
Dinosaurs have become part of the SF arsenal through monstrous threat of mad scientists or time travellers, and the lost remnants of archaic survivors. Barshofsky does a nice job of making this pseudo-nature reportage exciting, and really brings the relatively new idea of dinosaurs alive with great beasts chewing the cud or chasing each other around as is their particular ecological niche.
Dinosaurs have become part of the SF arsenal through monstrous threat of mad scientists or time travellers, and the lost remnants of archaic survivors. Barshofsky does a nice job of making this pseudo-nature reportage exciting, and really brings the relatively new idea of dinosaurs alive with great beasts chewing the cud or chasing each other around as is their particular ecological niche.
However, they’re just
a part of this story. This one combines the decadant civilization of
Mars from The Voice of the Ether with the frontier atmosphere of
Martians with the frontier spirit of The Asteroid of Gold and Out of
the Sub-Universe.
The other half of the
story complements the atmospheric scenes of dinosaurs in the wild
with a plot about a spearhead colonial mission, setting up camp in
the Jurassic jungle. We slowly gather that Mars itself is becoming
uninhabitable (as in The War of the Worlds) and this is the tester
group that will establish whether the Earth is suitable for Martian
life.
Despite the courage of
the explorers, but the colony is finally destroyed by the mighty
perhisoric beasts. For all their technology, there’s not much they
can throw at a hundred tons of rampaging allosaur, and there’s the
inevitable implication that it’s the very presence of the Martians
that sets the events in motion. These kinds of heroic disasters were
an essential part of the myth of the frontier and here we have a
story that not unlike Jamestown or part Scott of the Antarctic, a
demonstration of indomitable spirit in the face of imminent
destruction.
Unlike Wells’
Martians, though, these are Men like Tuol Oro in The Voice of the
Ether. We feel their failure as if they were our brothers. Perhaps
that’s the point, that the human spirit is universal and
universally admirable. More likely, though, is that we’re being
presented with a lesson in hubris here: it’s happened before and
it’ll happen again. This is where we’re headed and we’d better
be better prepared for it than the Martians.
Themes: vastness (gulfs
of time), the frontier, plucky but doomed explorers, dinosaurs vs aliens, pedagogy.
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