Customer Reviews

Fossil Hunter: Book Two Of The Quintaglio Ascension

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I read this many years ago,[volume one [Far Seer]] and loved it . Gave it to my son who was about 12 at the time and he still talks about it - he is 26 now! [It's the only Si-Fi he has read.] When I stumbled across the next two books recently [Not sure if they were even written back then!] I was thrilled and bought them instantly. Devoured them in a couple days and was very happy. They are as good as the origional, and my son is reading them now and agrees. Excellent reading for all ages!

Fossil-Hunter



Fossil-Hunter is the second book of Sawyer's Quitaglio Ascension. Sawyer brings back the fascination to Science Fiction that I haven't experienced since I was a young teenage boy reading Norton and Heinlein.

In Fossil-Hunter Sawyer borrows elements from real History to add bits and pieces to his characterizations. In this one he borrows bits and pieces from Shackleton's Antarctic exploration, a little Charles Darwin, a blind Sherlock Holmes (I realize that Holmes was fictional), and a little David and Goliath and even a little Rocky Balboa ( another fictional character). This time the characters include not only Afsan, but also, his children, Toroca,et al.

In this book, Sawyer introduces the Watcher, a character that is even more important in his book Calculating God.

Next comes Foreigner, Oh, Joy.
I strongly recommend this book and am looking forward to the next one. Can you tell?

I immediately orderred "Iterations" to see what Sawyer's Short Stories are like. You might want to,too. This guy is good!

I never dreamt that I would read a book about intelligent dinosaurs and not only enjoy it but find it thought provoking. Robert Sawyer certainly is the best science fiction writer today. Though I often don't agree with his ideas, the concepts are compelling and make you think. Sort of like Juan Rico in Starship Troopers who said his History and Moral Philosophy professor in high school had discussions that would wake you up in the middle of the night and make you think: What did he mean by that?
The problems of leadership and acceptance of differnt ideas are central to the Fossil Hunter. Sometimes you can avoid death by standing still after studying the enemy. It is a terrific set up to the conclusion of trhe series. I highly recommend the entire Quintaglio series.

What would it be like to be the Charles Darwin of an alien world? Especially a world dominated not by thinking primates like ours, but by dinosaurs. Robert Sawyer's Toroca, son of savants on the Quintaglio world becomes just that during an expedition to the Southern Pole of his world. He wonders about the origins of the bizarre creatures he encounters there, arriving at the conclusion they are in fact birds - an unknown species except in the fossil record.

Toroca's father, Afsan, is meanwhile caught up in the defense of the Emperor of the Quintaglio. Facing more than simply a palace revolution, the future of the Quintaglio people may be hanging in the balance. Challenged by a brother to relinquish the throne, Dybo is coached by Afsan in preparation for a test of strength to answer the challenge. As so often happens, cunning, not strength, is the determining factor in the outcome. Afsan must also confront the novelty of murder, rare in Quintaglio society. Adding to the stress is the fact that the victims are his own children.

Sawyer develops the theme of a society alien to ours, but with significant parallels. His tactics in presenting the Quintaglio are effective. It's an interesting concept. The trilogy makes a good addition to any speculative fiction collection.

Building on the world and society so well created in Far-seer, this book doesn't quite meet the high standard set in the first book of the Quintaglio Trilogy but is still a great read. While several of the key characters from Far-seer reappear, the main characters are Afsan's children, in particular Toroca, who is instrumental in discovering the biological history of the dinosaurs' world. The Watcher (who does much more than watch) is introduced and we learn at last the solutions to puzzles mentioned in Far-seer, such as why the dinosaurs only need to sleep alternate nights, as the author puts forward his own interesting theory regarding the Fermi Paradox. Charles Darwin's experiences and insights from his expedition to the Galapagos Islands are cleverly recreated as Toroca's expedition to the South Polar Ice Cap discovers how natural selection has unfolded for their world. Throughout the book, we see how the dinosaur society meets the challenges of governance and population control as they come to a new understanding of how their physical and cultural environment have shaped their development.

Robert J. Sawyer is a master at creating interesting characters and weaving an intriguing story-line. Excellent book.

I had finished book one, the fireplace was going, and my cat was asleep on my lap. What to do? Order book two of course. A minute later it was on my Kindle without even waking up the cat. (I think Kindle will do for readers what the remote did for TV watchers: turn us into couch potatoes.)

I'm only half way through right now, and so far, it's as engrossing as book "Far Seer" was. My only complaint is that the Kindle edition has a lot of typos (I've found about 10 so far). Lots of mixups between "f", "t", and "!", and between "o" and "e". It's almost as if the Kindle edition had been OCRed from the paper edition, although I've never looked at the latter to confirm this. Hence, only 4 stars.

The reason I gave this book one less star than Farseer is because starting quite early in Fossil Hunter we are given a God's eye view, or near enough, into what's really going on. I loved Robert Sawyer's exploration of science and faith in Calculating God, but sudden revelations that none of the Quintaglios are privy to are out of place in this book. If the existence of a godlike being is a fact of the Quintaglioverse, then the trail of evidence should lead us step by step to that fact and we should discover it at the same time as the Quintaglios do.
In the plus column, I enjoyed catching up with some beloved characters a generation later. Many characters and relationships gained interesting new dimensions. A shocking revelation from the first book was explored in detail in this one. This book really explores how Quintaglio culture and psychology differ from our own. I found it thought provoking about how much human morality and civilization are based on the biological facts of mammalian reproduction. Given the same level of intelligence, could reptiles ever arrive at the same beliefs about the worth of the individual? Should they?

RJS is one of my favorite authors..

I like it. And the other books in the series as well..

MJL

The first best is of course Far-Seer .... the first volume in this trilogy. But this one is a very worthy follow up. Whereas the first was about a dinosaurian Galileo, this one is about a dinosaurian Darwin. Worth the price just for the great cover, but it's what between the covers that shows why Sawyer has won both the Nebula and the Hugo. Exciting and fast-paced .... filled with sense of wonder.