Disposable Lit Reviews

AvoNova, 1992
274 pp.
ISBN 0-380-76277-3

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It was somewhere in the mid-’80’s that publishers realized that science fiction authors could be franchises, just like all of the other hot sci-fi properties, the media tie-ins and the series novels. I think it was Isaac Asimov’s Robot City that pioneered using science fiction writers as a marketing commodity, letting younger novelists write new stories that fit in with the grand masters’ universes and body of work. To my knowledge, none of them ever produced any truly memorable books; no one does their best work hoeing someone else’s row. But they fulfilled the publishers’ greatest expectations: The books sold.

Other people got into the act. Arthur C. Clarke at least claimed co-author credit, and maybe he even contributed enough to earn the byline, even though he was still obviously coasting on the work of a younger, hungrier, more energetic scribe. With the rest of the science fiction wall being overrun with Dungeons & Dragons trilogies and Star Trek novels (based on each of the TV series and then some) and the resurrected flood of Star Wars mini-series, I guess it all fit in.

The last person you expected to sell out and let his name be used as a brand label was Ray Bradbury.

But he did.

Dinosaur World (or, as the cover proclaims, Ray Bradbury Presents Dinosaur World) is the first of a five-book set written or co-written by Stephen Leigh, all of them a single time-travel adventure based on one of Bradbury’s most famous short stories, “A Sound of Thunder” (soon to be a major motion picture that will almost certainly suck buttock). From the outset, you can be sure that these books can’t come close to living up to the name above the title; Bradbury is a supreme stylist best known for his short stories. The idea that any other writer could capture the Bradbury magic and somehow sustain it across five volumes is ludicrous. But even then, it still could have been better than it is. It ain’t good.

Aaron, Jennifer, and Peter are all high school seniors in Green Town, Illinois in a tension-fraught love triangle. Their last summer together changes drastically when an allosaurus stumps out of the wooded hollow behind their houses, chased by a frantic and injured employee of a Time Safari expedition. Investigating, they get sucked into temporal rifts. Jennifer and Peter end up together in an alternate past dominated by tribes of intelligent dinosaurs and get captured along with Eckels, an errant paying customer of the Time Safari. Aaron and the expedition employee, Travis, take a wrong turn and find themselves in an alternate present in which no intelligent life has evolved; instead, they come under the scrutiny of a millennia-old world-wide hive mind. Can they all stay alive long enough to find the spot at which time diverged and maybe set things right?

This might have been an enjoyable story. Not high art, no — it’s too full of implausibilities and conveniences (could you learn the language of intelligent saurians competently in three days?), and the characters show a Dr. Who-ish tendency toward splitting up and getting captured. But it could have been a passable sci-fi adventure yarn.

And I can only lay the blame for its failure, even by those low standards, at the feet of Stephen Leigh. The back of the book lists him as the bestselling author of Alien Tongue; I’ll admit to not having read that book, but I can’t imagine that it became a bestseller if Leigh’s writing was this leaden and lumpy there. The human characters fare worse than the dinosaurs; background exposition is plopped in our laps in a lump, the dialogue would make a pulp hack blush, and too often Leigh explains to us what characters are thinking and feeling, instead of giving us action and dialogue that can actually tell us the story. It’s prose on the level of what we used to expect for young adult fiction (before Harry Potter demonstrated that even younger readers can stand engagingly written novels). It’s the output of a writer working for hire and collecting the paycheck.

Will I read the rest of the series? Probably, eventually; I’ve got all five of them, and now that the worst of the exposition is out of the way, hopefully the following books go down a little smoother. And the end of the first book is worse than a cliffhanger — it stops in medias res, as if the partitioning of the volumes were done by simple chapter count.

I’ll probably read ‘em. But I won’t recommend ‘em.

Nathan Shumate