Customer Reviews

BONE WARS

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
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There's not a great deal of geological science-fiction extant, so I'm pleased to report that Bone Wars is worthy of your attention.

Montana Territory, 1876: Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope are both digging in the Judith River fossil beds, with no great success, and spying on each other's camps. They learn of another bone-digger, who shields his camp behind a "ghost wall," and has found some truly magnificent dinosaur specimens. A *fourth* paleontologist appears, an odd-looking fellow who claims to be from Iceland, and wants help to save the prize bones from being shipped off to "Sweden"....

Stir in a cowboy who's really a girl, a Sioux who's a Yale graduate, a deserter from the Little Big Horn, and a wild ride on a ceratopsian -- all done in impeccable late-19th century prose -- and you have a most entertaining confection. Recommended, with the usual caveat that others' reaction to (alleged) humor is notoriously unpredictable.

Brett Davis, whose writing I haven't previously encountered, has clearly done his historical homework. He writes in a spritely mock-Victorian style that's just right for the tale. This is a very amusing book. Fluff, but *good* fluff. I picked this one up on a whim, having heard of neither author nor title. I'm glad I did.

Happy reading--
Pete Tillman
Consulting Geologist, Tucson & Santa Fe (USA)

This novel is not half as good as its sequel. It seems Davies was practicing still when he wrote it and that he developed his satirical talent only when he wrote the second novel. It is a good read though, interesting enough. But you are a little disappointed when you read the second book first.

This is a light and entertaining novel set in the Wild West in the post-Custer's last stand period, when Men were Men and so were paleantologists. The competitive parring of the foremost experts in the field, O. C. Marsh of Yale and Edward Cope of Philadelphia, is the milieu further complicated by the presence of a young woman masquerading as a man, Sitting Bull and nearly the entire Sioux nation, and two extraterrestrial bone-hunters with advanced technology and and secret agendas of their own. I enjoyed it -- I have been fascinated by the great "Bone Wars" (see the Kathryn Lasky novel of the same title for an entertaining take) for a long time (not geological time, but nevertheless...) so I was a sucker for this novel.

I liked this book. It was well written and an enjoyable read. I think I expected to read about a few more dinosaurs than just a monoclonius and a lizard man. Compared to Thomas Hopp's new Dinosaur Wars, this one comes off as a little lacking in the thing I read dino-fiction for: Dinosaurs! Still, it is long on charm, with space ships and wild indians. It might be a little dated by its view of dinosaurs as cold-blooded lizards, because scientists have recently learned that the beasts were warm blooded and covered with feathers, as in Hopp's two new dino-novels. Well, I suppose even dinosaur fiction is evolving.

Take a couple of world-renowned paleontologists, mixed with a little wild west action and the discovery that a couple of aliens have come to earth with the express desire to take back dinosaur bones to their home planet for "reanimation" and you've got the premise to "Bone Wars".

When rival paleontologists, O. C. Marsh and Edward Cope, find themselves in direct competition for what few dinosaur bones they can find in Montana during the mid-1870's, imagine their amazement (and this reader's) when they discover that the two other scientists who are competing for fossils and bones as well may actually be visitors from another world. It seems these "foreign" scientists have technology far beyond anything they have seen. This technology both mystifies and terrifies the paleontologists, so Marsh and Cope soon realize that if they're going to succeed in keeping the bones here on earth, they will need reinforcements. To add to an already bizarre plot, the reinforcements come in the shape of the Sioux Indians under the direction of Sitting Bull himself.

To paraphrase Yogi Berra, if this all sounds just a little too weird for your tastes, then it probably is! I'm sure that the "dinosaur crowd" will enjoy it, even though there are not enough references to dinosaurs in the book for my liking. The "Western crowd" should like it because author Brett Davis does a creditable job taking the reader back to the world of 1870 America. And those who like stories about Indians will enjoy the scenes that include the Sioux and Crow tribes. There's even a little love interest in the book for the romantic in all of us!

Oh, it's a descent story and a quick enough "read", it's just that "Bone Wars" is not the type of novel that the average reader will want to dig up and put above their fireplace.

RECOMMENDED (to the groups mentioned above)