Customer Reviews

The Shores of Kansas

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I read this as a teenager book when it first came out. They had a copy at my local library & I think I read it about five times when I first took it out, then at least once a month for about a year, and then every two or three months until it disapeared from the shelves, a victim of shortage of space. I mourned its loss for years. About three years ago I picked up a battered old paperback copy on-line. I can't say that it hadn't dated in many ways, especially the sex scences (which I loved as a teenager!) and in terms of what we know about dinosours. But I still thought it was great! Grant Ryals, the silent, lonely man who walks through time with only his ax and his wits to keep him alive, having a harder time dealing with the present than the pre-historic past. Fantastic!
(By Fr Levi of [..])

Grant Ryals is a taciturn Missourian who possesses a rare gift: he is one of only a handful of people who possess the ability to travel through time. Even among this group, though, Ryals is unique, as he is the only one who can travel back to the pre-human past. Ryals uses this to establish an institute devoted to the study of the prehistoric flora and fauna, which flourishes with the publication of books, journals, and the release of movies, all of which are the product of his solo journeys to the past. Yet Ryals finds survival in the distant past easier than living in the present, as the unwanted fame his adventures have brought him and his struggles to deal with the efforts by the institute's manager to abandon Ryals's research efforts for more lucrative plans sends him back ever more frequently to the past - at the risk of his very life.

Robert Chilson's novel offers an interesting approach to the time travel tale. Here time travel is less the issue than a plot tool, an escape hatch for his central character. The details are usually left out to make room for Chilson to develop Ryals, an introvert whose gift makes him into a global celebrity. Chilson's description of Ryals's trips to the past are the best parts of the book, as Ryals watches sauropods lay eggs and is tracked by a tyrannosaurus rex. By contrast the chapters in the present are less interesting, as Chilson does not spend as much effort to develop his characters and at times seems at a loss as to what to give them to do. Moreover, as a product of its time, the novel suffers from the now-outdated understandings about the dinosaur and how they lived, a problem that becomes acute as Ryals's interaction with them forms a key part of the book. These deficiencies detract significantly from the novel, making it one that only die hard fans of the premise will enjoy.

Grant Ryals is a hillbilly with the much-heralded ability to travel back in time to Earth's prehistoric past. Armed with axe, camera and good ol' boy wisdom, Ryals battles all the traditional dinosaur dangers (big toothy dinosaurs, little toothy dinosaurs, medium-sized toothy dinosaurs) to bring back important scientific evidence.

Grant hates all the trappings of modernity - bureaucracy, government, society, money, all women and most men (especially the ones that can't do their own plumbing). For each of these, Chilson is there to show us a situation, and then, after showing us, tell us exactly why Grant feels the way he does.

The sole virtue of The Shores of Kansas is the handling of the science fiction element. Rather than waxing un-poetic about the science of time travel, Chilson just has it exist as a the plot-pushing device that it is. A few pseudo-scientific elements are inserted on occasion, but, overall, Chilson keeps the focus on the character, rather than the SF trappings. His descriptions of the prehistoric era are meticulously detailed (sometimes too much so), but that can be excused (or at least categorized) as part of the heavy-handed attempt to illustrate how Ryals feels more at home in the past.

As a piece of character-focused science fiction, The Shores of Kansas succeeds, although only because it is so unpleasantly overt about the task. Unfortunately, the character is so utterly distasteful that the book falls victim to its own dubious success. If Grant Ryals prefers the loneliness of the prehistoric swamp, I, for one, am happier to leave him there.

Take one misfit time traveler driven to escape the insanity of modern life, one sturdy ax, and cross with a hungry Tyrannosaurus Rex--the result is The Shores of Kansas, one kick-butt masterpiece of science fiction. This book is perhaps one of the greatest time travel novels ever conceived and a definite pleasure to read.