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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Michael Swanwick's Great Time Travel Tale,
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This review is from: Bones of the Earth (Hardcover)
Next to William Gibson, Michael Swanwick may be the most interesting writer to have emerged from the 1980's cyberpunk movement; he's certainly as fine a literary stylist as Gibson. Judging from the rich vein of Swanwick's work, from cyberpunk to fantasy, and now, time travel, it's possible one could argue that Swanwick may be the better writer. "Bones of the Earth" is one of the finest time travel tales I've ever read. It certainly has the best depiction I've seen of dinosaurs in fiction; it seems far more realistic than the dinosaurs depicted in Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park" novels. Swanwick combines a gripping time travel tale with a splendid elegy to science as a grand quest in search of knowledge. I am pleased that his most despicable character is a diehard fundamentalist Christian terrorist, whose world view is diametrically opposed to the one subscribed by the scientists - and by Swanwick himself - in this exciting, well-written tale. Without a doubt, "Bones of the Earth" is one of the finest science fiction novels published this year.
20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A mind-bending adventure,
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This review is from: Bones of the Earth (Hardcover)
Not another time-travel-dinosaur book? Ever since Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder," fifty years ago, and doubtless even before that, time travelers have been going back to the Mesozoic to mingle with dinosaurs. Well, yes, but this tale is told by Michael Swanwick, and that makes all the difference in the world, any world. Swanwick is a virtuoso writer, equal to any in the genre. He has taken that hackneyed old theme and crafted something magical and compelling from it. His prose is as clear and prismatic as crystal, his characters are maddeningly complex. As for the paradoxes that bedevil time travel, which most dabblers in the Mesozoic sweep under the moss, Swanwick rolls them all up in a ball and clobbers us with them. He revels in them. He skirts the edge of farce with them, yet he spins us along in a rollicking page-turner of a yarn that ultimately comes to a poignant and deeply logical ending. He is up to date with all the latest thoughts on dinosaurs and throws in some marvelous ecological speculations for good measure. Go there and breathe the air of the Mesozoic; hear it, feel it, smell it. After one career as a geologist and another as a professional writer, I do feel competent to review this particular book. I found it extremely satisfying. I cannot recommend it more highly.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Be patient -- reading this book is worth the effort!,
By
This review is from: Bones of the Earth (Hardcover)
Swanwick is a gifted, provocative writer (I loved _The Iron Dragon's Daughter_), but he can also be challenging and not terribly forgiving of the reader; you have to pay attention. Several times in the first third of this book, I nearly gave it up as a bad job. (Even terrific writers have bad days.) But I reconsidered and decided to be patient, and I'm glad I was. I'm a fan of time-travel plots, but the skeins of causality and chronology are incredibly tangled here. The subjects are paleontologists -- bone-hunters -- who have suddenly been invited by the Pentagon, in the year 2012, to join in an intensely secret project to study first-hand the dinosaurs, ranging over a period of several hundred million years, via the time travel technology to which they inexplicably have access. I thought, "What?" Does anyone believe the government, least of all the military, couldn't come up with more important (to them) uses for time travel than pure scientific research? (Patience; all will be revealed.) The author does a brilliant job of letting the major characters develop in wholly believable ways, of showing how a changing combination of personality and circumstances can produce highly varied results. Because everyone exists in several different "plies," different timelines, depending on decisions made or not made. Richard Leyster, not always the most brilliant scientist but a very, very good paleontologist nevertheless, is the most sympathetic. Gertrude Salley, on the other hand, can be positively loathsome in her selfish arrogance and manipulative attitude toward the world -- but she has a purpose in the story, too, and she's not all bad. Griffin, the consummate bureaucrat, is the most complex and to some extent the least understandable -- but that's the kind of person he is. Apart from the fascinatingly complex human interactions which alone would make this a very readable book, Swanwick knows and communicates a great deal about the way science works and how scientists think, plus shrewd speculation about saurian behavior. The jargon and overuse of taxonomy is a bit overwhelming at first -- but this is also deliberate, to immerse the reader in the paleontologists' mental universe. And he also gets in his licks at the religious fanaticism of faith-oriented thinking, so alien to the scientific mind, by convincingly (and chillingly) describing the terrorist activities and mind-set of "deep creationists" -- anti-evolutionists so convinced of their sole access to Truth, they construct a jihad and throw bombs. (Yes, there really are people like that in contemporary American society, plenty of them.) What I first was afraid would represent a narrative failure turned out to be one of this author's most affecting books. Read it.
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