If you’re like me, the best way to get ready for Jurassic World is not to binge-watching Parks and Recreation while wearing a Velociraptor mask, but instead to do some reading—while wearing a Velociraptor mask. But what are you going to do when you’ve finished re-reading Michael Crichton’s science-heavy page-turners Jurassic Park and The Lost World? Luckily there are still plenty of insane science fiction books with dinos running through them for you to devour and then blabber about about endlessly.
Dinosaur Planet by Anne McCaffrey (1978)
This little-known McCaffrey effort was written in the early days of her career, while she was still formulating the Pern series. The novel concerns a group of space travelers who “discover” a planet called Ireta which they hope to mine for awesome precious jewels. Instead they find a bunch of dinosaurs and mutineers; bummer! A sequel called The Survivors–sometimes Dinosaur Planet II–was published in 1984. (How many other sequels can boast an ALTERNATE title of Dinosaur Planet II? Was this a missed opportunity for Go Set a Watchman?)
The original cover of Dinosaur Planet also features this guy who looks like He-Man but in the novel is anything but. When republished, Dinosaur Planet and Survivors were re-titled The Mystery of Ireta. Presumably, because Pern took off (pun intended) and Ireta didn’t, McCaffrey didn’t return to this universe after the publication of Survivors. But if you love dinosaurs and space travel and mutineers, and you do, then this is your book.
The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1912)
Featuring Conan Doyle’s other famous protagonist—Professor Challenger—The Lost World is probably marks the beginning of western science fiction’s obsession with humans interacting with dinos. When a journalist named Edward Malone is assigned the task of getting an interview with the cankerous Challenger, he gets more than he bargained for and it’s not long before everybody ends up visiting a secret plateau populated by dinosaurs, flying prehistoric reptiles, and APE MEN!
There’s a lot of dated BS to deal with in this novel: Victorian sexism, Conan Doyle’s confusing stances on British Imperialism, not to mention the general proto-Hemingway machismo of Challenger himself. And yet, the novel is redeemable because Doyle (through his Watson-esque narrator, Malone) seems to be critical of his characters’ opinions about the world. Plus nearly every scene with dinosaurs is endlessly memorable. Of all the fictional books about dinosaurs, this one has obviously been adapted into film or television more than any other. And of course, Michael Crichton took this title outright for the second Jurassic Park novel. Oddly, in terms of structure and themes, the first Jurassic Park book is more like Doyle’s The Lost World than Crichton’s The Lost World is. But whatever. Without this book we wouldn’t have Jurassic Park, or King Kong, or… or…
Thunder Series by James F. David (1995)
Starting with the novel Footprints of Thunder, continuing in Thunder of Time, and most recently Dinosaur Thunder, this series imagines strange temporal inconsistencies causing the contemporary world to collide with aspects of the Cretaceous world. Dinosaurs are eating people and jungles are randomly popping up everywhere. In the latest book, a T-Rex has even been discovered on the moon! (We’ve always wondered what else was on the moon…) Believe it or not, there simply haven’t been many books in which dinosaurs (even in fossil/skeletal form) show up in space. It’s actually shocking that Crichton never attempted to do just that. Really, we should have been surprised that no one—not even Michael Crichton or James F. David—had used the title “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” until the 2012 Doctor Who episode.
Quintaglio Ascension Trilogy by Robert J. Sawyer (1992)
In addition to writing the dinosaur time-travel novel End of An Era, Robert J. Sawyer is also responsible for this trilogy featuring intelligent extraterrestrial dinosaurs. Primarily concerning a highly evolved form of T-Rex (they got over that whole tiny arm deal) called the Quintaglios, this trilogy is all about how a species of sentient dinosaurs evolved on another planet and essentially forget that they were ever from Earth. The Star Trek: Voyage episode “Distant Origin” has the exact same premise, only the space-dinos are way less fierce.
Sawyer’s trilogy consists of the books Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, and Foreigner, the final of which finally saw some of the Quintaglios coming home to Earth. They also discover more intelligent dinosaur species and generally all have a hard time coming to terms with the various aspects of having an outer space dinosaur culture which has repressed a ton of its history.
Cryptozoic! by Brian W. Aldiss (1967)
Though more of a trippy time travel book than strictly a dinosaur book, this novel must hold a unique place for having its characters be safer when they’re hanging out in either the Devonian or the Jurassic than they are in their own “present.” Weirdly not featuring actual time travel, author Brian W. Aldiss (famous for Supertoys Last All Summer Long) instead asserts a conceit here called “mind travel.”
The book’s primary protagonist is one of the pioneering “minders,” which means they’ve figured out how to time travel in their brains! Somehow this is not a dream and actually real, and people can set up tents and stuff in the Jurassic where they can sell groceries while other dudes ride motorcycles near some Stegosauruses. Did I mention the main character of this books is also an artist? That’s his job. To draw things he sees while faux-time traveling and checking out a few dinosaurs. Again. This book truly gets weird when the protagonist decides it’s time to “wake up.” This book is best read right before bed and under the influence of, well, anything really. Also, you gotta hand it to Aldiss for insisting on that exclamation point in the title.
Dinosaur Tales by Ray Bradbury (1983, et al.)
Boasting an introduction by Bradbury’s childhood friend and monster-guru Ray Harryhausen, this collection attempts to round-up all of Bradbury’s dinosaur stories. There are two which are perhaps the most famous: “The Fog Horn” and “A Sound of Thunder.” The former deals with a psuedo-dinosaur who attacks a lighthouse because it thinks the fog horn is another dinosaur wanting to mate. This story was originally published in The Saturday Evening Post and later adapted into the film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. In the movie, the dino is a fictional creature called a Rhedosaurus, and it walks a little more like a lizard than an upright dinosaur, but in terms of our obsession with dinos, this still totally counts. (For a total understanding of how reptiles that walk like alligators are different than dinosaurs, read Brian Switek’s book My Beloved Brontosaurus.)
Meanwhile, in “A Sound of Thunder,” a bunch of jerky guys travel back in time to go on a safari to shoot a T-Rex. Their actions against a little butterfly cause intense ramifications to the timeline, resulting in certain aspects of their original reality being erased from history. A 2005 film adaptation of this story starring Ben Kingsley has also been successfully erased from history.
Dinosaur Tales is out of print, but these Bradbury dino stories (and others) are widely anthologized in all of his books. Or perhaps, in all books ever. They’re all that good.
Honorable mention: The Dinosaur Lords by Victor Milán (2015)
Victor Milán’s recently published epic is all about knights riding dinosaurs in a fantasy kingdom, plus it has fantastic cover and interior art by Richard Anderson. I’m not seeing a downside here.
What’s your favorite dino-read?
This article originally published June 5, 2015.
Ryan Britt is the author of Luke Skywalker Can’t Read and Other Geeky Truths out this November from Plume(Penguin) Books. He’s written (and wept) about dinos since before he can remember.
There’s a Star Trek novel, First Frontier, with intelligent dinosaurs. Read it once and then tossed it.
I probably first read this when I was way too young.
Dinosaur Beach by Keith Laumer. Amazingly NOT politically correct, but I had a lot of fun reading it all those many years ago.
Anonymous Rex by Eric Garcia has dinosaurs! They faked their extinction and live among the humans in disguise. Tongue in cheek noir mysteries – fun stuff.
Early Piers Anthony – Omnivore/Of Man and Manta trilogy. Very memorable encounter between a genius, nonathletic human and a T-Rex that plays out in several alternative world scenarios.
Brandon Sanderson – Alcatraz books. Alcatraz and his team meet up with a group of civilized dinos in one of his adventures.
Wait, no mention of the Dragonstar series? STL generation ship enters the solar system and the US and USSR send a joint expedition to it. Where they discover dinosaurs. Including sentient raptor analogs before it was cool.
I loved the serialized version in Analog when I was a kid.
Another one I recall was the abduction of a flight full of teenage children by aliens to a ship where a Jurassic environment is artificially maintained. I can’t recall the title, but it wasn’t that good a novel.
The City of Dreaming Books is a novel about sentient dinosaurs living in a society entirely defined by literature.
Grant Morrison’s Dinosaurs vs. Alien is entertaining.
Harry Harrison’s West of Eden trilogy — that asteroid back in the day just barely missed. Fast-forward sixty-five million years and a strange, new world arises from the old, a world of intelligent sauropods who dominate the planet, and intelligent hominids who live in the cracks.
(Technically, I think the only actual dinosaurs are Triceratops, who have been deliberately cultivated as living fossils by the Yilane (the intelligent sauropods).)
Hmmm … It occurs to me that I haven’t read those books in many, many years …
Editors note : McCaffrey returned to Ireta in the Sassinak trilogy – the second book the Death of Sleep is the story of Sassinak’s grandmother, who was one of the survivors of Dinosaur Planet 2.
Michael Swanwick’s Bones of the Earth: for a brief while, the most technically accurate SF book about dinosaurs. Also Greg Bear’s Dinosaur Summer, a sequel to The Lost World.
ETA: Brian Aldiss wrote “Poor Little Warrior”, a response to the dino-hunt stories of de Camp and Bradbury…
David Gerrold’s “Deathbeast”… read as a kid, did a big impression…
I’ve always found it odd that the same guy who wrote about such a cool concept as Footprints of Thunder, also put his name on a Christian rapture series with Judgment Day. It probably shouldn’t matter, but it’s nagged at me and kept me from reading the rest of his dinosaur series.
I see Michael Swanwick’s Bones of the Earth was already mentioned above, so I’d just add
The Doctor and the Dinosaurs by Mike Resnick, Bone Wars by Brett Davis, and (most importantly) Raptor Red by Robert T. Bakker.
BONES OF THE EARTH is, IMO, the big one missing from your list, Ryan
If you’re counting comics, the 1978 Judge Dredd story “The Cursed Earth” is the earliest example I can think of for “T. rex recreated for amusement park, breaks free, havoc ensues”. It’s kind of interestingly right at the beginning of the point when the people writing Judge Dredd realised they had a setting that would last long enough that they should be doing world-building that would hold together, IMO
Glad to see the original The Lost World on the list. Too many people don’t go past Sherlock Holmes when they think of Conan Doyle’s work, forgetting books like this and medieval adventure The White Company. And Professor Challenger is my favorite Doyle character, lots of fun.
More fantasy than sf, but Diane Duane’s Book of Night with Moon and To Visit the Queen have intelligent dinosaurs who have evolved enough to deal with wizardry, if I remember correctly.
I think they’d be more fantasies, but dinotopia and the sequel are worth mentioning.
McCaffrey did in fact return to Ireta and her dinosaurs in the Planet Pirates Omnibus (Sassinak & Generation Warriors & The Death of Sleep) written with Elisabeth Moon and Jody Lynn Nye. Great read.
May I submit THE DINOSAUR FOUR to this list?
It’s focused more on the characters and their conflicts than science or philosophy.
Also, the dinosaurs all have feathers and the herbivores are just as dangerous as the carnivores.
If you’ve run out of dinosaur books to read, give it a shot.
As others have noted, McCaffrey returned to the Dinosaur Planet in her collaborations with Elizabeth Moon and Jody Lynn Nye. What’s more, those particular books helped launch Moon and Nye’s careers, given that they were among the earliest instances their names were featured on covers of best-selling SF titles. McCaffrey believed strongly in sharing her success and paying it forward, and thus helped to launch the careers of many SF writers out of obscurity and into wider fame in the present day.
Furthermore, there’s Diane Duane’s Feline Wizardry books, which deal in part with an excursion back to the ancient past and a race of sentient dinosaurs therein.
Wow! I was so wrong about Dinosaur Planet!
I love being wrong. Now I have good stuff to read.
Thanks all.
One of my favorite YA books – Oliver Butterworth’s ‘The Enormous Egg’. A New Hampshire chicken lays an egg that hatches out a Triceratops. Much fun ensues. Written in the mid-50s, it still holds up incredibly well today.
Tuf Voyaging by George R. R. Martin has dinosaurs and cats.
Rivers of Time by L. Sprague de Camp has time travel and dinosaurs.
Dinotopia! Because before the YA series there were the awesomely illustrated original books by James Gurney.
I also want to mention the Animorphs book, In the Time of Dinosaurs. I recently reread the Animorphs series and they hold up surprisingly well.
There’re a couple of fun ones you missed:
_Tunnel Through Time_ by Lester del Rey and _Eridahn_ by Robert F. Young.
Try John McLoughlin, Toolmaker Koan: main point is to explain why there are no signs of extraterrestrial intelligence (technological species self-destruct), but there are intelligent dinosaurs (and an explanatory backstory).
And James Gurney’s Dinotopia and its sequels
Not a full dinosaur novel but Jim Butcher’s Dead Beat (Dresden Files) features a zombie dinosaur.
Heinlein’s “The Star Beast” features a dinosaur-like extraterrestrial “pet,” that may not be a pet. Any more info would be a spoiler.
Harry Harrison’s West of Eden series has intelligent Dinosaurs competing with early Humans.
This post raises many vital questions, such as:
Why haven’t people ALWAYS been obsessed with books about dinosaurs?
Why aren’t there even more books about dinosaurs?
Why don’t more books about dinosaurs focus on the best dinosaur- Brontosaurus
And there’s James Blish’s The Thing in the Attic in his Seedling Stars pantropy collection. And the Lithians, Dinosaurian aliens in A Case of Conscience. The Demons in The Thing in the Attic – dinosaurs – always struck me as an absurd complication to the plot, since evolution is guaranteed to no repeat on other planets, ergo there will be no alien dinosaurs.
Diane Duane’s Young Wizards and its spin-off series, Feline Wizardry, are both great, with thoughtful elements re. good vs. evil, choices and consequences, acceptance of differences (even those between, e.g., a young human and a tree or a shark), etc., combined with fantastic adventure. As a cat-lover, it was neat to have the similarities between cats and reptiles pointed out (sun-basking, slit-pupils, …). I do have to point out, though, that FW’s sentient dinos of the “fifth claw” were not precisely in the ancient world, as I recall; it was more of a “center of the earth” thing, condemned to live w/o the sun, until now they’ve become sufficiently advanced and their leaders want to reclaim the world. Correct me if I’m wrong, because I do remember the house-cat protagonists took on their ancient wildcat forms for part of the tale. I haven’t re-read Ms. Duane in too long!
What about The Year the Cloud Fell by Kurt R. A. Giambastiani? In which Custer’s son, after his zeppelin crashes, falls in with dinosaur riding Native Americans; kind of Dances with Wolves meets Jurassic Park. I haven’t read it for years, but stil remember Laughs Like a Woman and Mouse Road, and especially the sequence in which Mouse Road tames her — I think it was a hadrosaur.
I literally read Raptor Red until it fell apart, and I am neurotically careful with my books! I still remember the turtle snack and the animals having fun sliding down the snow-covered hillside.
Threshold by Flint and Spoor begins with the discovery of a group of beautifully preserved dinosaur fossils that appear to be right on the K/T boundary. As the lead paleontologist reconstructs the death scene, she realizes that she is looking at a ring of raptors that were shot by an unmistakable alien that left its bizarre remains in the middle of the circle. She must now present her findings without torpedoing her career. And then spoilers spoilers.
Check out the novel “Re-Creating the Cretaceous, A Tale of Survival.” This book is what the “Jurassic World” should have been. No Dino World, Triceratops petting zoo, no attack trained velociraptors and no hybrid dinos. In “Cretaceous” you have one of the most original, realistic and detailed methods for recreating dino DNA along with numerous new avian, terrestrial and aquatic species discovered in the last thirty years. There are also no pseudo-heroines running around in high heels for half the story or bratty pubescent kids to muck up the tale. “Cretaceous” also exposes the incestuous Hollywood film industry and one man’s unbounded greed. Well researched and most important, highly plausible, “Re-Creating the Cretaceous is the qual to Michael Crichton’s original story.
How about Taylor Anderson’s Destroyermen series? Okay, some folks count time travel as SF and some don’t – and some do/don’t depending on how it’s handled. Anyway, I just figured it’s worth a mention. ;-)
Unlike Michael Crichton, Michael Swanwick opted to consult with professional dinosaur paleobiologists while he was researching and writing his great time travel epic, “Bones of the Earth”, which remains the best speculative fiction novel ever published on dinosaurs, not counting maverick dinosaur vertebrate paleobiologist Robert T. Bakker’s “Raptor Red”. Aside from Bakker, the greatest vertebrate paleobiologist of the 20th Century, George Gaylord Simpson, wrote a novella, “The Dechronization of Sam Magruder”, which was published posthumously years after his death.
I second “The Dinosaur Four”, I found it better than Bones of the Earth. Also another honorable mention would be “Cretaceous Dawn”
OHMYGOD so i just read the article about how Mario names line up with Jurassic Park names, and there was the thing about Jurassic Galaxy/Dinos in Space, and then I randomly read this article next and see:
Believe it or not, there simply haven’t been many books in which dinosaurs (even in fossil/skeletal form) show up in space.
BUT THERE IS ONE! ONE!