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In rural Wisconsin, wonder clashes dangerously with corporate greed when an alien visitor opens up a gateway through time into a breathtaking prehistoric lost world On sabbatical from teaching at a small university, paleontologist Asa Steele is content to relax amidst the pastoral splendor of his Wisconsin farm. That is, until his dog starts bringing home unrecognizable artifacts and, strangest of all, fresh dinosaur bones. Since boyhood, Asa has heard the rumors of a UFO crash site nearby, and his encounter with a cat-faced alien life form proves the old story to be shockingly true. A gregarious immortal stranded on Earth for fifty thousand years, Catface has the power to create portals in time, and now he has opened a gateway into a prehistoric world of wonder and beauty, a place Asa calls "Mastodonia." But keeping this idyllic realm a secret from a prying government and the greedy corporate entities it serves could prove impossible--and perilous--when there are resources to drain, land to despoil, and gargantuan vanished beasts from a distant age to hunt down and destroy in the name of profit. Clifford D. Simak's glorious vision of a gateway to the past and of the tantalizing commercial potential of all things prehistoric predates Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park by many years, yet it remains as provocative, enthralling, and fun for twenty-first-century science fiction lovers as it was for its original readers. Breathtaking, thrilling, imaginative, and awe-inspiring, Mastodonia is a world that, once entered, can never be forgotten, such is the unique creative genius of legendary science fiction Grand Master Simak, one of the most revered writers ever to dream the future . . . and the past.… (more)
User reviews
It's a fairly entertaining novel, one that, as seems typical of Simak, is rather low-key and doesn't really do what you might expect most SF writers to do with a premise like this. There's some lip service paid to worries about changing the past, but mostly the story is not focused on questions about how time travel works and what its dangers are and so forth, but more on weird little questions like: if you set your corporate headquarters up in a time before the United States existed, can you get out of paying US taxes? Of course, with questions like that, my brain kept wanting to read some sort of political allegory into it all. I mean, I can't imagine this being written today and not being presented as a sharply pointed satire about capitalism or government regulations, or something. But, as it is, its main stance on politics seems to be that there's an awful lot of complicated silliness in it, which I don't think anybody could argue with. Mostly it's just a fun little story, with dinosaurs and mastodons. And, despite a fudging of the distinction between archeologists and paleontologists, I believe the science is pretty accurate to what was known about dinosaurs in the 1970s, including mentioning some of the scientific controversies of the time. It also does a refreshingly good job with its female main character. I kept bracing myself because I thought I saw an annoying bit of sexism inbound, but it never showed up.
I would have enjoyed it more but the seemingly clever characters made one wild decision after another. I would
It's still a good story in the Simak tradition.
Maybe someday I'll come back to it because the idea is interesting, but the writing style bothers me. There's an awful pattern of telling what happened in the past, and while I'm usually okay with an author not being vigilant about the "don't tell them, show them" rule of writing,
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Omslaget viser et gammelt træhus tæt ved en skov. Foran huset er der nogen, der har parkeret en flyvende tallerken.
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
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| 813.5 |