My reactions to some of the pieces in this collection after reading it in 2007.

“Kingdom of the Titans”, Robert Silverberg -- Silverberg talks about his life long fascination with dinosaurs starting from an early age. He says that, if he hadn't have become sidetracked into becoming a sf writer, he would have become a paleontologist.

“Dinosaurs for Adults”, Peter Dodson

“The Dawn of the Age of Dinosaurs”, Sankar Chatterjee

“Crocamander Quest”, L. Sprague de Camp -- This seems to be a sequel to de Camp's famous time travel story "A Gun for Dinosaur". It's also about hunting dinosaurs and nothing special, apart from its descriptions of the early Mesozoic. The plot revolves around the problems of a mixed sex outing and the sexual jealousy and violence that result from a woman being in the group.

“The First Dinosaurs”, Catherine Forster

“The Feynman Saltation”, Charles Sheffield -- Sheffield had a long time interest in the science of cancer starting with the death of his first wife from cancer. It inspired his novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow. And, in the end, the disease killed him -- brain cancer, to be exact, the same disease the hero of this story, a scientific illustrator, is suffering from. Here, it propels his consciousness back through time. He begins to draw extinct forms of life, and, in one of those coincidences that sf short stories frequently feature, his sister just happens to be able to interpret them since she's an expert in paleo anatomy. Before he jokes, he makes a joking Isaac Asimov allusion by saying he has a positronic brain. (A positron being an electron traveling backward in time.)

“The Dinosaur Radiations”, Teresa Maryanska

“Siren Song at Midnight”, Dave Wolverton -- An effective, if despondent, story about future environmental degradation, political propaganda, and genetic engineering. The narrator is a woman whose memory is shortly to vanish since she has deliberately taken a drug that is chopping up her memory so that neither her father (she smuggles the drug to him in a kiss) or her can have their brain interrogated post-mortem by the tyrannical Alliance (a political union of the Americas seemingly). Her father aided the genetically engineered sirens, a hybrid human species that finds their oceanic dwelling grounds threatened by pollution and overfishing. At first, the narrator thinks her father innocent that gradually realizes he really has aided the sirens. She herself, at story’s end, helps rescue and siren woman and child. At story’s end, hearing the propaganda lies told about her father’s execution, the narrator takes comfort in the news that the sirens will be exiled off world on an unspoiled planet. The dinosaur angle necessary for inclusion in this anthology comes in the narrator’s father resurrecting extinct species of life via DNA. One such species is the Mesozoic Euparkeria.

"The Jurassic Period: A Time of Great Change", David Gillette

"Rhea's Time", Paul Preuss -- This story has a similar plot to another in this anthology, Charles Sheffield’s “The Feynman Solution” in that both start out in contemporary times and involve characters somehow temporally regressing to have visions of Earth’s distant paths. (Perhaps both authors wanted to avoid the obvious time travel device to mix humans and dinosaurs together and to link the now with the past.) The titular Rhea is a biostratigrapher who lapses into an odd coma. The narrator, a neurologist treating her, discovers that she moves in deliberate ways, albeit very slowly, and can speak if hypnotized. Her words, it is eventually revealed, are the details she observes as she moves from Earth’s beginnings to the present day. She is her coma for a year so her reports become a literalized version of that geological metaphor of imagining Earth’s geologic history scaled to a year. Her dialogue is interesting, but even more interesting is the way that science journalist Preuss works in details of geology, neuroscience, physiology, and particle physics. (All of which he has touched on in sf novels.) And there is the odd matter of Rhea’s marriage to physicist Arthur who seems unconcerned about her state, rarely visiting her. The narrator wonders about their initial attraction (Arthur plausibly claimed they appreciated and understood each other’s work) and possible marital discord in the nature of the accident (and the delay in calling an ambulance) that put Rhea in a coma. The two are very pleased, at story’s end, that Rhea is pregnant. I sense that Preuss is making sort of a black box metaphor of others’ marriages to certain physical events like quantum states that can not be entirely known a la Schrodinger or the idea specifically alluded to here that a particle traveling at the speed of life has no knowledge of events it doesn’t participate in.

"The Age of Giants", Anthony Fiorillo

"Shakers of the Earth", Gregory Benford -- This story uses an idea Benford is fond of: resurrecting extinct species via DNA. Here, it is resurrected dinosaurs at the Kansas Sauropod Park of 2050, the resurrecters being the Japanese DNA expert and the American geologist who fall in love on a dig and spend their married lives resurrecting dinosaurs. The Japanese woman is dying on opening day, but the two take a publicized ride on a Seismosaurus. It is the huge size of the Seismosaurus’ vertebrae that enable them to find some DNA that escaped destruction. The best part of the story, which is nothing really exceptional, is the problems they encounter during the project: literally mothering (via bottle feeding? It’s not stated) the infant dinosaurs and discovering their need for gastric stones unavailabe in the sterile confines of the lab. (Benford conveniently skips over the whole problem of how you create a dinosaur in an egg in the first place.)

"Dinosaur Predators", Halszka Osmolska

"Hunters in the Forest", Robert Silverberg -- A nothing special story by Silverberg about two time travelers in the Cretaceous world who meet, fall in love, and toy with the idea of leaving their overly structured, predictable world behind for the primitive simplicity of life in that era. Indeed, the man Mallory thinks he leaves Jayne behind to do just that, that she has made the permanent commitment he never could and wants him to. Then at story’s end, it’s revealed that Jayne didn’t either though she is unsure what she would have done if Mallory agreed to stay in the Cretaceous. In some sense, this rebellion against an orderly world, here only a contemplated, personal rebellion, more of an escape actually, is reminiscent of the theme of Silverberg’s “The Millennium Express” with its historical figures (Einstein, Picasso, Hemingway) of the past resurrected to bring anarchy into a future, near utopia.

"The Cretaceous Dinosaurs", Don Lessem

“In the Late Cretaceous”, Connie Willis -- This is sf in the same way that Pamela Zoline’s famous story “The Heat Death of the Universe” is. Neither story has anything fantastical in it, yet both use the metaphor of an event from science (Zoline’s, of course, the end of the universe and Willis the extinction of the dinosaurs) and gain from being read in the context of sf. Willis, as she often does, opts for humor, and it’s more sophisticated than the burlesque and puns and parodies that frequently show up in sf humor. Indeed Willis freely acknowledges the style owes much to the screwball comedy movies of the 1930s and 1940s. However, for me, unlike many, that’s a style that doesn’t work too well on the page. Here Willis does a characteristic thing of making a running gag out of some character’s obsession or problem, specifically Professor Robert Walker running battle with the college’s parking authority. But I did laugh in parts, specifically educational consultant Dr. King’s all too realistic (given his profession) mangling of the English language with nominalizations and other novel, awkward constructions. Main character Sarah Wright even remarks, after he says “impactization” and a student says he thought impact was a noun that “once, back in the Late Cretacous, it was a noun”. And there is the wonderful last paragraph which has Dr. Othniel, described in terms as a hunched dinosaur, sniffing the air and staring at the sky after discussing what killed the dinosaurs. Because, in this story, the whole metaphor is that the Paleontology Department of the college is about to go extinct like the dinosaurs. Some, like Wright, will evolve and avoid extinction. (She leaves to undergo pilot training.) Others, like Othniel, will just be wiped out by King, who shares symbolism and a name with predator tyrannousaurus rex. There is an element of satire in the whole story. (With another engaging bit being Professor Albertson’s totally inappropriate borrowing of teaching gimmicks from teacher movies.) Food supply, mammals, and competition are all listed by Othniel as reasons for the dinosaurs dying out and each is represented in the symbolic mapping of the story. King’s gimmicky calls for new pedagogical methods represent competition; budget cuts are food supply; the often inattentive students probably represent mammals -- the next phase of life. What’s not so clear is Willis moral stance on this -- satire usually requires a moral stance. Does she applaud the possible death of the department? Given what I know of Willis’ and statements by Wright, I think Willis values knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Yet, Albertson’s and Othniel’s teaching methods are ridiculed to one extent or another. Yet, their replacement, King’s methods and Albertson’s acceptance of them, are clearly not applauded. I suspect Willis is adopting no moral stance, just noting, as with the death of the dinosaurs, that it’s irrelevant whether it’s right or wrong. It’s simply inevitable and one has to evolve, like Wright, or die. That would be a common philosophical stance of sf.

“Major League Triceratops”, Barry Malzberg -- It took me awhile to get into this story. I’m not a fan of Malzberg in general, and I often find his writing obscure and bloated. This had some of that. Some of the metaphors were strained. Still, I thought Malzberg’s take on the old idea (already alluded to in this collection and, of course, in Ray Bradbury’s clasic “A Sound of Thunder”) of hunting dinosaurs was interesting. In his future world, time travel to the age of the dinosaurs is already passe, another fad of apocalyptic novelty that has faded (of course Malzberg, never much one for explicit speculative rigor, doesn’t say what these apocalyptic fads and fancies were). The dinosaurs, for the characters of this story, seem to have been disappointing repositories of cosmic significance and personal knowledge. Guide Robles and his lover Muffy, seem to have the passion leached out of their lives during the time spent at Camp Paradox, a vaguely described operation (again Malzberg likes to go for metaphors and internal dialogue over explicit speculation and explication) that neither exists now or in the Cretaceous). Hunter Dix, some sort of media personality, hopes to find personal significance in killing a triceratops. The ending, where the wounded triceratops charges Dix and kills an intervening Robles (who is against the whole idea of hunting in the Cretaceous because of possible temporal paradox -- the Dix hunt is the first held), seems contrived. Nor did I see the significance of the framing story with the unnamed paleontologist and lover Maria -- except the unexamined portent of Robles skull seemingly showing up in a prehistoric diagram. There were some good bits of characterization through prehistoric metaphor, enough to save the story’s interest, but I wouldn’t call this a success.

“Migrating Dinosaurs”, Philip J. Currie

“Herding with the Hadrosaurs”, Michael Bishop -- This is a fruitful mixture of the sf notion of sections of land experiencing timeslips (a notion going back, I believe, to Murray Leinster’s “Sidewise in Time”) and the Old West of history and myth, specifically the white captive of Indians. Timeslippage has propelled chunks of land to different times. Our narrator’s parents are killed migrating from St. Joseph, Missouri (of course, the traditional starting place of many a migration west) into the Cretaceous (thus introducing the anthology’s theme of dinosaurs) by tryannosaurs. The narrator, 16, and his younger brother, five, join a herd of hadrosaurs for survival. They come to know each individual. The younger brother, Button, really goes “native” and helps nurture the young hadrosaurs. Both travel for years with the migrating dinosaurs. There is the (cliched in terms of the predictable rape of the narrator by them) inevitable encounter with humans again, here a pair of mountain-man like hunters, that proves dangerous and unwanted. The story ends with the narrator, descendent of a father who hated authority and thus fits one the pioneering types, being released from jail after serving 25 years on a murder charge. He hears rumors of his brother still being alive in the Cretaceous, but he is banned from that and other timeslip periods. He can only migrate to a period in the future when man has become extinct. I suspect that it is not only a sign of the narrator’s pioneer spirit and the taint of his time with the hadrosaurs, but a general disenchantment and alienation from humanity that has the narrator planning such a migration.

“The Behavior of Predatory Dinosaurs”, Ralph Molnar

“Besides a Dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?”, Ray Bradbury -- Typical Bradbury: poetic style, set in the past (seemingly during Prohibition) in the Midwest. This is more of a mainstream story than fantasy or sf though protagonist Benjamin may be, through sheer concentration and fervent wishing, becoming a dinosaur, it’s more likely that his odd behavior (perhaps sleepwalking) is non-fantastic. Eventually, his grandfather convinces the orphaned Benjamin to channel is dreams into something more plausible and doable: being a locomotive engineer.

“Monsters of the Sea and Air”, Kenneth Carpenter

“Unnatural Enemy”, Poul Anderson -- This is sort of Anderson taking his assignment -- a sf story for the anthology’s section on “Monsters of the Sea and Air” -- quite seriously and straight. He gives us not a regular sf story but an animal story reminiscent of Ernest Thompson Seton. The unnatural enemy of the title is Harpoon, the elasmosaur. Unnatural because the wound he suffers at the hands of Vorax renders him mad, dangerously so for his fellow elasmosaurs and other large predators that he normally would not attack. Watching the initial confrontation is Alae the pteranodon. He sees Harpoon’s wounding, how that wound causes him to lose out in mating combats with his elasmosaur rivals, and the final confrontation between Vorax and Harpoon. The latter is fatally wounded in that fate. But Alae ends up in his stomach after venturing too close to the wounded animal. I wonder if based that last bit around a plesiosaur fossil (elasmosaurs were plesiosaurs) with a flying reptile in its stomach. There is also the typical aura of Anderson doom about the story with the proud, old, but doomed and mad Vorax. To top it off, the last paragraph hints at the approach of the comet which is going to doom nearly all the life in the Cretaceous sea. Think of this story as sort of a pre-historic Ragnarök.

“Becoming a Modern World”, William Gallagher

“Dawn of the Endless Night”, Harry Harrison -- This sort of plays off Harrison's West of Eden series. Harrison does a nice job depicting this civilization of sentient dinosaurs coming to terms with its death via comet. The end is ironic given that the alternate history of the series is derived from the dinosaurs not being wiped out by an asteroid as happened in our time yet an asteroid, in this story, still kills their species eventually and clears the way for mammals to develop sentience.

“Myths, Theories, and Facts on Dinosaur Extinction”, J. David Archibald

“The Bone Wars: Cope, Marsh and American Vertebrate Paleontology, 1865-1900”, Ronald Rainger

“The Green Buffalo”, Harry Turtledove -- I had read this story before. (It references the feud between paleontologists Marsh and and Cope, and one of Marsh’s collectors shows up as a character here.) It’s nothing special, essentially a geographic timeslip story pioneered by Murray Leinster’s “Sidewise in Time” and represented elsewhere in this same anthology by Michael Bishop’s “Herding with Hadrosaurs”. During the brief timeslip, a triceratops enters the area around Lusk, Wyoming in 1890 and is shot by the narrator and his fellow hunters who don’t really know the significance of what happened. ( )