Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Montana Isle gives the term "tourist trap" new meaning, August 29, 2004
It's pretty much standard practice - if you travel in time, you pretty much have to pay a visit to the dinosaurs. In the case of Will Hubbell's Cretaceous Sea, the cast of characters has no other choice because the only time coordinates available to them transport them back to the late Cretaceous era. This isn't standard time travel science fiction, though; in the hands of the author, time travel is more a means to an end than anything else. The actual journey back in time is surprisingly bland here; you would expect man's first temporal journey to be full of technical jargon and references to all kinds of whatsits and to take on some kind of kaleidoscopic majesty in the telling. Here, the journey is nothing short of boring. Time travel itself isn't the real focus of the novel, of course, so it is not really a weakness. The story really only begins when our party of eight arrive some 65 million years in the past.
Peter Green is the mysterious man behind the secret time machine, and he is intent on getting the financial support of a Mr. Moneybags by the name of John Greighton. Greighton agrees to come along for the temporal ride, seeing the trip to "Montana Isle" as a vacation to the most exotic resort ever conceived - one which just so happens to exist 65 million years in the past. He brings along his latest silly, young fiancé as well as his somewhat estranged daughter Constance. Green isn't too happy when he learns Constance is coming, so he has an underling hire paleontology graduate student Rick Clements to join the team and, in so doing, keep Constance out of his hair. Clements is skeptical of the time travel claim, but he can't pass up an opportunity to study live dinosaurs. Rick, unhappy with the unexpected duties he finds himself providing for the "guests," soon begins to figure out that there is something not right about this whole thing - the artificial caves for the rich "tourists" do not seem to have been constructed by human hand, for instance, and Green's assistant Joe definitely seems to be keeping some important secrets. After a rocky start, he and Con develop a connection, and she leads him to still more mysterious secrets, in the form of unknown technology, hidden inside the caves. One such object of seemingly alien design is a set of strange, constantly changing symbols. Eventually, Rick figures out that it is a clock counting down to nothing less than the K-T event. The "resort" is actually an observatory located in extremely close proximity (geographically as well as temporally) to the spot where the giant meteor that killed the dinosaurs crashed to earth - staying on the island means imminent death.
The second half of the novel becomes a story of survival in the hardest of ecological times. In the wake of the meteor crash, Earth's skies are preternaturally darkened for months, the temperature drops to frigid levels, vegetation is devastated by the environmental impact of the meteorite, and wildlife dwindles down to next to nothing. Small mammals may have survived the end of the Cretaceous Era, but that doesn't mean a twenty-first century man and woman with few supplies can, especially when a few dangerous dinosaur breeds are wandering around with increasingly empty stomachs. Living in such a devastated world, cut off from everyone and everything you have known (by 65 million years, no less) is tough, but it is here that Will Hubbell's main characters finally begin to shine.
As the secrets of Green's time machine are gradually revealed, more and more questions are raised as to the actual origin of the device, the people who built it and their goals, the prospect for Rick and Con ever returning to their own time, and others. The paradox of traveling back and forth in time only adds additional ambiguity to the mix. Hubbell is able to engineer a small series of plot shifts as the plot advances toward its conclusion, making up for a few weak spots in the story and ensuring that Cretaceous Sea comes across as an entertaining, thought-provoking novel.
The reader knows from the start that Peter Green is up to no good, and his ambitions turn out to be of a very stereotypical variety. Actually, all of the secondary characters in the novel are rather weak and shallow, especially John Greighton and his annoying fiancé. Only one supporting character possesses enough depth to ever become interesting. Rick and Con, for their part, are much more agreeable characters - Cretaceous Sea is really their story, and the novel really doesn't begin clicking on all cylinders until the focus is squarely placed on their fight for survival. Several aspects of the novel could have benefited from more time and attention, but Hubbell does manage to produce a fairly unpredictable ending that works quite well indeed. There's not enough to Cretaceous Sea to make it a truly impressive science fiction novel, but it is certainly an above-average, wonderfully entertaining piece of writing.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The story is where it's at..., January 28, 2005
Yes, it's classified as science fiction, but the real story here is ...well, the story. Yes, it's about time travel, but that only sets up the real tale, which is about a trio struggling to stay alive when everything is stacked against them. This is not Michael Crichton - the technical aspects are concerned more with paleontology than time machines.
The main plot in this book could have just as easily taken place in the desert, instead of a meteor-impact-induced wasteland, with lions chasing the heroes instead of starving dinosaurs. Each time you think that the characters are about to win out, they are dealt a devastating setback. That might not be so special in itself, but the characters are so likeable that you just have to keep rooting for them, all the while believing that there's really just no chance that they will survive. The only times the time travel aspect really comes into play is at the end when it's used to give the story a couple of great twists.
Need more proof that this is just a great story? I gave the book (along with Sea of Time) to my mother, who hates science fiction. She just laughed at me. But I convinced her to give them a try, and she called me in a couple of days to thank me for giving them to her. She couldn't stop talking about them. If you're a big reader - especially and ecclectic one - I think you'll love them.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I never saw that ending coming, December 16, 2002
Most time travel novels seem to get bogged down in either cause and effect trivialities, or long winded explanations of how the time travel works. Mr. Hubbell does neither. He gets into a little (very little) about paradoxes and also about how the time machine works, but just enough to set the stage.I must say that all the way through the book I thought I had the ending pegged. I didn't mind, as this is one of those books you keep reading even though you know the ending. Good characters, good plot settings and fine action. Then you get to the end. All I will say is, you're not going to believe it. Either that or you are more cognizant of what was going on. Regardless, it took me by surprise, and I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Go ahead, spend your money on this one, you won't be sorry.
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