Time Safari [Paperback]

David Drake (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Baen (March 1, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671698125
• ISBN-13: 978-0671698126
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #831,292 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

The Army took David Drake from Duke Law School and sent him on a motorized tour of Viet Nam and Cambodia with the 11th Cav, the Blackhorse. He learned new skills, saw interesting sights, and met exotic people who hadn't run fast enough to get away.

Dave returned to become Chapel Hill's Assistant Town Attorney and to try to put his life back together through fiction making sense of his Army experiences.

Dave describes war from where he saw it: the loader's hatch of a tank in Cambodia. His military experience, combined with his formal education in history and Latin, has made him one of the foremost writers of realistic action SF and fantasy. His bestselling Hammer's Slammers series is credited with creating the genre of modern Military SF. He often wishes he had a less interesting background.

Dave lives with his family in rural North Carolina.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent outdoors adventure stories before Jurassic Park, August 12, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Time Safari (Paperback)

Time Safari was originally a short story, and was then published as a novel under the same name by including two additional stories: Calibration Run and Boundary Layer. It was published again as Tyrannosaur, with Calibration Run replaced by another story called Tyrannosaur.

These stories trace the central character Henry Vickers through his involvement with time travel (through a mechanism invented in Israel). Vicker's is the modern day white hunter born a hundred years too late and he is unable to make a living in the modern world, even failing in marriage. Vickers finds that being a safari guide is the thing he is cut out to be and he can accept the rugged in-the-wilds life. He marries a client who also shares an interest in outdoors and hunting, and they form a team together.

People who are interested in pre-history, hunting and outdoors adventure will like this one. Calibration run is set in the age of saber-tooths and pre-human hominids, but is still a good! tie-in. The dinosaurs in the other stories are fast, and alive, not clunking grunting lizards. I read this before Jurassic Park ever came out and was wanting someone to make a good dinosaur movie as a result. Jurassic Park's velociraptors were straight out of Time Safari, except that David Drake's characters aren't clueless preppy sub-urbanites when they meet.

David Drake is a visual writer, concentrating on what is going on rather than dissecting the characters in self-centered introspection. He includes a number of technical details to add grit, yet he doesn't (for example) make up some hokey theory of time travel mechanics and try to expound on it, boring the reader with pages of fake quantum mechanics like some writers are guilty of. He is the type of writer who admits to an interest in dinosaurs since he was a boy, and who also admits that his version of the dinosaur will one day be outdated. And he concentrates on people; his stories expound on human interaction, an! d while they feature disasters they aren't horror stories.<! P> Similar to this book is Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World novel (the original, not Michael Chrichton's version) which is dated and illogical, but interesting, and L. Sprague de Camp's Rivers of Time stories.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Does changes in the past change the future or has it already happened., July 19, 2008

By 

Terry J. Womack - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Time Safari (Paperback)

A look at if the past can be changed by traveling to the past or has it already happened and we are living it now. Also a good look at how we are powerless over people, places and things; just our own actions, attitudes, and thoughts...T.