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Bones of the Earth

By: Michael Swanwick
Narrated by: Kevin Pariseau
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Summary

World-renowned paleontologist Richard Leyster's universe changed forever the day a stranger named Griffin walked into his office with a remarkable job offer... and an ice cooler containing the head of a freshly killed Stegosaurus.

For Leyster and a select group of scientific colleagues, an impossible fantasy has come true: the ability to study dinosaurs up close, in their own era and milieu. But tampering with time and paradox can have disastrous effects on the future and the past alike, breeding a violent new strain of fundamentalist terror - and, worse still, encouraging brilliant rebels like Dr. Gertrude Salley to toy with the working mechanisms of natural law, no matter what the consequences. And when they concern the largest, most savage creatures that ever walked the Earth, the consequences may be too horrifying to imagine.

©2002 Michael Swanwick (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
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Critic reviews

"Expanded from his Hugo Award-winning story "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur," Michael Swanwick's Bones of the Earth is a time-travel novel as exciting as Jurassic Park and far more intelligent." (Amazon.com review)

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So much promise but ultimately didn’t go anywhere

Performances were good but the story just didn’t seem to match up to its potential.

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  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

A new definition of Tedium

This has got to be the most boring and utterly pointless book I’ve had the misfortune to read.
Cardboard characters who have little or no idea what they’re doing, who’s motivations change from one page to another.
Add to this, a story that is fragmented to the point where I thought whole chapters had been omitted and you’ll get the picture.

The author’s approach to temporal paradox is one of utter contempt. Two copies of the same character occupy the same time in a briefing room - One young man with an older version of himself. This occurs repeatedly.
(This Author is supposed to be a science fiction writer?!)
The explanation of paradox near the beginning of the book is so unintentionally funny I had to stop play-back to recover.
His confusion between philosophical logical paradox and Temporal paradox, can only be an attempt to smoke-screen the shaky physics that this story is based on.
I’m not laughing now - The money I wasted on this mess could have been spent on something worth reading.
For some time I held on to the hope that it would give a worthwhile description of the epochs where the stations were located… However, the author had different ideas.

If you’re expecting Jurassic Park or Walking with Dinosaurs… Forget it.
These plastic parodies of people wonder through time from station to station without even looking out the windows.
The stations are not described in any detail, and on one occasion a group ventures outside, they wander around the landscape with the naive attitude of children taking the dog for a walk.

A far better example of time-travel can be found in Stephen Baxter’s “The time ships”
This doesn’t brush inconvenient physics under the rug but explores it in detail.

I think the main problem with ‘Bones of the earth’ is the lack of direction , the author couldn’t decide what type of book it should be and every aspect of it suffered has a result.


But it’s your money, you decide…

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