A hole in time, or in the head?

kw: book reviews, science fiction, time travel, dinosaurs

In Russian folklore, Baba Yaga is a baby-eating witch who lives in a cabin that runs around on huge chicken legs. In Primeval: Extinction Event by Dan Abnett, which largely takes place in Siberia, tyrannosaurs get loose in the 21^st century, and the Russians who encounter them—and survive—call them Baba Yaga.

The book is based on the Primeval TV series (ITV, Britain), in which "anomalies" that link older times with the present allow all sorts of ancient animals to get loose in places like London. The series takes advantage of the continuing public fascination with "people versus dinosaurs", a phenomenon that dates back to the discovery of dinosaur fossils in the early 1800s. One of my first books was of the "All About Dinosaurs" genre, and our family had a coffee-table book with historical artwork including swamps filled with brontosaurs and a couple dozen other dinosaur species, with a few kinds of pterosaurs in the sky.

As I've grown older I've sometimes wondered at this public fascination. Do we really need bigger and meaner things that could eat us, to populate our nightmares? Is getting stepped on by a Diplodocus any more final than having an elephant crunch you flat?

Anyway, in this novel the scientist Cutter and two of his assistants, the team that is at the forefront of Anomaly research, get kidnapped and taken to Siberia, where a much larger and longer-lasting anomaly has turned a large area into a misplaced section of the Cretaceous age, complete with tyrannosaurs, large sauropods and hadrosaurs, ceratopsians, and even packs of wolf-size Troodons.

Here is my own fascination with the vagaries of time and survival. Had there been no Chicxulub asteroid to bring the Age of Reptiles to an end, mammals today would probably still be Spaniel-size and smaller, and some descendant of Troodon would be a (formerly, perhaps) scaly primate with space travel and atom bombs.

In Cretaceous Siberia, both tyrannosaurs and troodons are equally deadly, the scientists are surrounded with FSB (former KGB) agents who have no humor whatever, and it takes a highly unlikely sort of hacking session for Connor to use a Russian military satellite's EMP beam to close the big anomaly. Just there, the biggest cop-out of the book occurs. The author has shown plenty of imagination up to this point, but the critical button push ends a chapter, while the next one begins with an "after it is all over" sort of wrapping up. It is kind of like a half-hour speech being concluded with a single bland sentence. C'mon, Dan, give us one more chapter of our heroes, and a villain or two, barely surviving the attack of the killer satellite!

Oh, well, there was plenty of willing suspension of disbelief needed already. I suppose I can imagine my own dramatic "blow out all the radios and cell phones and laptops" scenario. I just hope the aging general in charge doesn't have a pacemaker!