Bones of the Earth [Mass Market Paperback]

Michael Swanwick (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 25, 2003

World-renowned paleontologist Richard Leyster's universe changedforever the day a stranger named Griffin walked into his office with a remarkable job offer . . . and an ice cooler containing the head of a freshly killed Stegosaurus. For Leyster and a select group of scientific colleagues an impossible fantasy has come true: the ability to study dinosaurs up close, in their own era and milieu. But tampering with time and paradox can have disastrous effects on the future and the past alike, breeding a violent new strain of fundamentalist terror -- and, worse still, encouraging brilliant rebels like Dr. Gertrude Salley to toy with the working mechanisms of natural law, no matter what the consequences. And when they concern the largest, most savage creatures that ever walked the Earth, the consequences may be too horrifying to imagine . . .

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Paleontologist Richard Leyster is studying the dinosaur-fossil discovery of a lifetime when a stranger comes into his office with an ice cooler and an offer: a mysterious and dangerous job that pays no better than Leyster's beloved current position at the Smithsonian. He rejects the offer and the stranger departs, leaving the cooler. Leyster opens the cooler and finds the head of a just-slain stegosaur. It really is an offer he can't refuse: a job that will allow him to study living dinosaurs. But the stranger has disappeared, and Leyster has no idea where to find him.

Expanded from his Hugo Award-winning story "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur," Michael Swanwick's Bones of the Earth is a time-travel novel as exciting as Jurassic Park and far more intelligent. In addition to the Hugo, Michael Swanwick has won the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. His previous books include the novels In the Drift, Vacuum Flowers, and Griffin's Egg, and his collections include Gravity's Angels, A Geography of Unknown Lands, and Moon Dogs, among others. --Cynthia Ward --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Bones of the Earth is a worthy successor to Swanwick's previous novel, Jack Faust (1997), for it, too, is a strange and thrilling take on great legends and cultural obsessions. In Bones, that obsession is the thoroughly modern fascination with paleontology and, in particular, dinosaurs. Paleontologist Richard Leyster is working on what should be the find of a lifetime and the making of a career. Then a stranger named Griffin makes him an offer by dropping into his office one day with a promise of great things--and the head of a triceratops, freshly killed. That piques Richard's interest, and he is on tenterhooks until Griffin comes back, and he accepts his mysterious visitor's requirements of secrecy. The subsequent action spans geologic time, not just centuries but millennia, and although Griffin understandably does everything he can to prevent paradoxes, as always, the unexpected happens, even when the future is firmly known. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: HarperTorch; Reprint edition (February 25, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380812894
• ISBN-13: 978-0380812899
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,083,604 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Michael Swanwick's Great Time Travel Tale, June 28, 2002

By 

John Kwok (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

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, May 4, 2002

By 

D. Duncan "Dave Duncan" (Victoria, BC, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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!, June 12, 2005

By 

Michael K. Smith (South Louisiana) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

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.