Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (158 page)

Now that this is better understood, the professor won’t send anybody to a period less than five thousand years prior to the time that some time traveler has already explored, because it would be too easy to do some act, like chopping down a tree or losing some durable artifact, that would affect the later world. Over longer periods, he tells me, such changes average out and are lost in the stream of time.

We had a rough time after that, with the bad publicity and all, though we did collect a fee from James’s estate. Luckily for us, a steel manufacturer turned up who wanted a mastodon’s head for his den.

I understand these things better now, too. The disaster hadn’t been wholly James’s fault. I shouldn’t have taken him when I knew what a spoiled, unstable sort of bloke he was. And if Holtzinger could have used a really heavy gun, he’d probably have knocked the tyrannosaur down, even if he didn’t kill it, and so have given the rest of us a chance to finish it.

* * * *

So, Mr. Seligman, that’s why I won’t take you to that period to hunt. There are plenty of other eras, and if you look them over I’m sure you’ll find something to suit you. But not the Jurassic or the Cretaceous. You’re just not big enough to handle a gun for dinosaur.

* * * *

Copyright © 1952 by Galaxy Publishing Corp.

The word “dinosaur” was coined by Sir Richard Owen in 1841. It’s a word that soon became very dear to the hearts of the eight-year-old child that lives inside every emotionally healthy adult.

Dinosaurs were a natural plot device for science fiction writers. Monsters which came in a variety of shapes and sizes and actually once roamed the earth—nothing with that much inherent dramatic interest would remain absent from popular fiction very long.

It was the man considered by many to be the father of science fiction who introduced prehistoric creatures into the genre. In Jules Verne’s
Journey to the Center of the Earth
(1864), a plesiosaur and an ichthyosaur (not actually dinosaurs, but contemporaries of them) have a brief cameo while locked in mortal combat with one another.

As science learned more about dinosaurs, especially regarding the amazing variety of species and presumed behaviors, their dramatic potential increased exponentially. The main barrier to placing them in a story alongside humans was the sad fact that they were all extinct. Verne managed to sidestep this problem by populating his unexplored world beneath the earth’s surface with survivors from the distant past. It’s a device that many other authors would also use.

It was Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, who really popularized the idea of a remote location where dinosaurs still live. His 1912 novel The Lost World sent an expedition to the top of a large plateau located deep in the Amazonian jungle. Once there, they encountered several large carnosaurs and a flock of pterodactyls while becoming involved in a genocidal war between cavemen and Indians.

Many other writers, especially during the heyday of the pulp magazines, latched on to the “lost world” concept. In the universe created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, for instance, it sometimes seemed impossible
not
to stumble across yet another such place. Tarzan encountered dinosaurs in a remote section of Africa in
Tarzan the Terrible
(1921), then later fought hand-to-hand against a T-Rex in
Tarzan and the Forbidden City
(1938). The underground world of Pellucidar (first introduced in 1914’s
At the Earth’s Core
) was stuffed to overflowing with various prehistoric beasts, as was the subcontinent of Caspak discovered in 1918’s
The Land That Time Forgot
.

Scientist and superhero Doc Savage, whose pulp magazine adventures ran from 1933 to 1949, found himself in a dinosaur-infested lost world on at least two occasions: once in 1933’s
The Land of Terror
and again in 1939’s
The Other World
. Many other pulp heroes, including a number of Tarzan knock-offs, also had their encounters with dinosaurs. The pulp writers simply couldn’t stay away from the gigantic beasts, while readers couldn’t get enough

of them.

The Lost World
was first adapted into a film in 1925, with wonderful stop motion effects by Willis O’Brien that brought the dinosaurs back to life. At the time, O’Brien’s work was unique and innovative. In fact, when Arthur Conan Doyle showed a print of the film to the Society of American Magicians, no one was able to figure out how the dinosaurs were recreated. A few even theorized that actual dinosaurs had been found alive and filmed.

In 1933, O’Brien created what is perhaps the most famous “lost world”—Skull Island, home of the giant ape named Kong.
King Kong
is the Holy Grail of dinosaur stories—it gave us wonderful stop motion effects beautifully photographed in black-and-white. The visual imagery is backed up by fast-paced storytelling and the entire film literally drips with imagination.

Through the years, other filmmakers have used their own lost worlds to bring dinosaurs to the screen, though few exhibited the same level of storytelling skills or visual artistry as
King Kong
. These dinosaur refuges include yet another remote island (
The Lost Continent
, 1951); a volcanically-heated valley tucked away near the North Pole (
The Land Unknown
(1957); a disappointing remake of
The Lost World
(1960); and a guilty-pleasure adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’
The Land That Time Forgot
(1975).

Dinosaurs pop up in the most unexpected places.
The Valley of Gwangi
(1969) dropped them inside a remote valley deep in a Mexican desert. When members of a Wild West show stumble into the place, they try to lasso and capture an allosaurus. This sequence, animated via stop motion by the brilliant Ray Harryhausen, doesn’t score any points for realism, but is arguably the most purely entertaining five minutes of film ever produced.

A single dinosaur surviving into the present, usually through some form of suspended animation, is another method of getting dinosaurs and humans together. This is a method that pops up more often in movies than in literature, with the most famous example being the Japanese film
Godzilla, King of Monsters
(1954).

In fact, many of the giant monsters popularized in Japanese movies are survivors from the prehistoric past. Often, these creatures have been enlarged and given unusual powers (such as Godzilla’s atomic breath) by nuclear radiation. The original Japanese version of
Godzilla
was actually meant to be a parable condemning atomic weapons, but later movies in the series set aside any thematic subtext to concentrate on the undeniable fun of watching monsters destroy cities and fight one another.

American studios also brought dinosaurs out of a deep freeze to terrorize the present, often tossing in a dose of radiation to explain impossible sizes or special powers. Both
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
(1953) and
The Giant Behemoth
(1959) were hundreds of feet in length and exuded deadly radioactive auras.
Gorgo
(1961), on the other hand, featured humans capturing a reasonably sized (40 foot tall) creature that had no deadly powers beyond its natural size. Only
he
turned out to be a baby and his much larger mom soon came looking for him…

Time Travel is yet another way of getting humans and dinosaurs together. Sometimes, such as in Robert J. Sawyer’s novel
End of an Era
(1994), the time travelling is done for purely scientific reasons. Though in this particular case, events were enlivened considerably when many of the dinosaurs encountered by the protagonists prove to be possessed by intelligent Martian viruses.

In many other instances, time travel is used to take safaris back to hunt dinosaurs. Ray Bradbury’s powerful short story “A Sound of Thunder,” (1950) is the first example of this. It proved to be an idea so filled with dramatic potential that a number of other writers have re-visited it. L. Sprague de Camp’s “A Gun for Dinosaur” (1956) explains why hunting dinosaurs is a very bad idea if you’re not big enough to handle a large-caliber rifle. A number of novels, including David Gerrold’s
Deathbeast
(1978), David Drake’s
Tyrannosaur
(1993) and Clifford Simak’s
Mastodonia
(1978) also centered around time-jumping safaris (though
Mastodonia
also dealt with the political and social ramifications of developing time travel).

If there’s no lost world to be found and time travel has yet to be invented, the next conceit is to recreate dinosaurs via genetic manipulation. Interestingly, the first time this was done in fiction may have been in a 1943 issue of
The Shadow Magazine
, a pulp magazine that showcased the adventures of a cloaked vigilante who often encountered mad scientists. This issue featured a short novel titled The Devil Monsters, in which the Shadow matches wits with a scientist named Monstrodamus. The evil scientist was living up to his name by growing dinosaurs and mythological monsters in his secret laboratory.

A half-century later, Michael Crichton popularized this idea with his bestselling
Jurassic Park
(1990). Crichton came up with a plausible-sounding method (based an idea suggested by scientist Charles Pellegrino) of recovering prehistoric genetic material via insects who were preserved in amber after drinking dinosaur blood. An egotistical rich guy then funded an effort to clone dinosaurs in order to create a tourist attraction. Naturally, things soon go horribly awry.

Jurassic Park
isn’t a perfect book. It has a few holes in its plot; Crichton is a little too eager to beat his readers over the head with his message that science can sometimes outpace our ability to control it; and a particularly bratty kid really needed to get eaten in an early chapter. But overall, his exciting action sequences and the notion that dinosaurs can be brought back to life make the novel a very enjoyable read. His 1995 sequel
The Lost World
is equally fun.

The movie adaptations used modern CGI to create some superb dinosaur sequences, but suffered from increasingly sloppy plot construction. The films did fuel a resurgence of popular interest in dinosaurs. In particular, the intelligent, doorknob-using velociraptors shown in the films caught the public’s imagination.

Director Stephen Spielberg decided to make the velociraptors in the films several feet longer than they were in real life to give them more visual impact. Ironically, just before Jurassic Park opened in theaters, a species of raptor (Utahraptor) was discovered that matched the movie creatures in size.

But it was the previously obscure name of “velociraptor” that remained in the public consciousness. Various versions of raptors have commonly appeared in dinosaur fiction since the film was released. One notable example of this is
Raptor Red
(1995), written by paleontologist Robert T. Bakker—an entertaining novel that follows the adventures of a female Utahraptor as it struggles to survive in a harsh environment.

The species even made inroads into professional sports when an NBA expansion team in Toronto choose Raptors as its nickname.

What if dinosaurs survived into more modern eras and eventually developed intelligence and their own culture? That’s the idea presented in Harry Harrison’s 1984 novel
West of Eden
and its two sequels. Harrison does a great job of creating an intricate and internally logical civilization for his dinosaurs before tossing them into contact with early humans. The main character is a human named Kerrick, who is captured as a child by the dinosaurs, then escapes as an adult with unique knowledge that will help the humans in the ongoing war between the two species.

Robert J. Sawyer also builds a complex and believable dinosaur civilization in a trilogy beginning with Far Seer (1992). Here, dinosaurs have been mysteriously re-located onto an Earth-sized moon orbiting a gas giant, allowing them to escape extinction. The species that develops intelligence eventually builds culture that holds very rigid and dogmatic beliefs. A scientist named Afsan, who acts as a thematic parallel to Galileo, finds his life in danger when he makes discoveries that seem to threaten those beliefs. Sawyer’s trilogy is full of great action and great ideas.

Dinosaur-centric science fiction serves all the same purposes as other works from the genre: They inspire ideas and imagination; they explore aspects of culture, technology and human nature; they show us as both the best we can be and the worst we can be. But dinosaurs populate science fiction primarily because they are really, really cool. They exist because that inner eight-year-old inside each of us yearns to join in a time safari stalking a dinosaur through the prehistoric jungle; visit Skull Island and watch King Kong go one-on-one with a T-Rex; or help out those cowboys in
The Valley of Gwangi
in their efforts to lasso an allosaurus.

Cowboys versus dinosaurs. How cool is that?

* * * *

Tim DeForest
lives in Sarasota, Florida, and is the circulation manager of the library at the Ringling College of Art and Design. He has written the books
Storytelling in the Pulps, Comics, and Radio
and
Radio by the Book
, as well as a number of articles on military history and the Wild West. He maintains blogs on pre-digital pop culture and old-time radio at comicsradio.blogspot.com and radioserials.blogspot.com