© 1985 by David F. Bischoff and Thomas F. Monteleone
I picked this and Guardian up from a local book shop to get a sense of the writings of SF author Thomas F. Monteleone. Way back in college I read a bunch of his short stories that really stuck with me over the years; I’ve read nothing else of his since. So it was with eager anticipation and the sneaking suspicion of a potential Guilty Pleasure that I plucked Night of the Dragonstar off the bookshelves for a reading.
Verdict: OK. Exactly what I thought it would be.
[minor spoilers ...]
Fairly early in the novel one thought popped up in my mind, and I think it essentially encapsulates what the story’s all about: Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama II meets Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. (Even though it was published five or so years before the Crichton novel hit the stands.)
That being said, it was a Guilty Pleasure. As my wife rephrased for me, “not high art, but entertainment.” That nails it, I think. I’m a very visual reader, so towards the end of the novel I was thinking that this would make an excellent Syfy channel movie. That also nails it, I think.
It’s a sequel, so there’s a lot of background that the authors have to fill in as the story progresses. It’s also probably the second installment in a series, as determined by the wide-open unresolved ending. I haven’t checked. We’re told a lot of what happened in the first novel mostly in a “press conference” setting, which worked, and in some chunks of exposition here and there, usually as a character is ruminating about his or her sexual and relationship dilemmas. There, not so much, but it had to be done, I suppose.
Apparently, an alien spaceship is discovered approaching Earth and is brought into orbit. The Rama-like object is a cylinder 320 km in length and 65 km in diameter. Inside, bizarrely enough, is a Mesozoic preserve, populated with the foliage and fauna of that era, along with, well, dinosaurs. Triceratops, stegosauri, T Rexes, an allosaurus and a brontosaurus here and there, even those little chicken-like critters that did in the old man in Jurassic Park. Piece by piece we discover that the first teams investigating the object, labeled the “Dragonstar”, met with failure of Crichtonic proportions.
But that’s all been solved by this novel. Indeed, there are science outposts on and in the Dragonstar. We are cooperating with a semi-intelligent lizard species called the Saurians. Things are going so well that one haughty Colonel decides to film a documentary within the artifact and flies all sorts of dignitaries and fish-outta-water soon-to-be victims up to participate.
The back cover tells us that – quite suddenly and unexpectedly – the Saurians go mad and embark on a feeding frenzy. Simultaneously, the Dragonstar arms itself with some type of force shield and seals itself with the couple-hundred humans trapped inside with the hungry dinosaurs. And while all this is hitting the fan, the ships engines come to life, propelling the ship out of Earth orbit to – who knows where?
This happens about halfway in. The remainder details how the survivors survive, regroup and respond to this unfortunate series of events. It ends abruptly with none of the great questions answered. But at least two major characters don’t make it through alive, which is enough to keep the reader on his toes.
Truth be told, I was expecting a more bloodthirsty novel, based on what little I’ve read of Monteleone. I mean, Jurassic Park was almost a horror novel in the gruesome deaths foisted upon the main characters for their sins of pride. Hubris plays a big role in this book, too, so there’s justification in the couple of deaths by dinosaur fang. However, it was remarkably subdued, almost as if the authors were going for a G rating. Which is okay, I’m not gonna pout over being shorted on gore, but I thought the horror aspect could have been played up much more to the novel’s success.
Overall it was an interesting concept that’s not as juvenile as one might first think. Is the artifact a seeding vessel or is it a species retrieval probe? Conceivably, could not the human race construct such vessels five or ten thousand years hence, to travel the star lanes, automated robotic ships containing labs and DNA and whatnot, both seeding humanity on suitable alien worlds as well as bringing back whatever life it might find? If not five or ten thousand years, then certainly at twenty-five or fifty thousand, no?
Interesting …
Verdict: OK. Exactly what I thought it would be.
[minor spoilers ...]
Fairly early in the novel one thought popped up in my mind, and I think it essentially encapsulates what the story’s all about: Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama II meets Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. (Even though it was published five or so years before the Crichton novel hit the stands.)
That being said, it was a Guilty Pleasure. As my wife rephrased for me, “not high art, but entertainment.” That nails it, I think. I’m a very visual reader, so towards the end of the novel I was thinking that this would make an excellent Syfy channel movie. That also nails it, I think.
It’s a sequel, so there’s a lot of background that the authors have to fill in as the story progresses. It’s also probably the second installment in a series, as determined by the wide-open unresolved ending. I haven’t checked. We’re told a lot of what happened in the first novel mostly in a “press conference” setting, which worked, and in some chunks of exposition here and there, usually as a character is ruminating about his or her sexual and relationship dilemmas. There, not so much, but it had to be done, I suppose.
Apparently, an alien spaceship is discovered approaching Earth and is brought into orbit. The Rama-like object is a cylinder 320 km in length and 65 km in diameter. Inside, bizarrely enough, is a Mesozoic preserve, populated with the foliage and fauna of that era, along with, well, dinosaurs. Triceratops, stegosauri, T Rexes, an allosaurus and a brontosaurus here and there, even those little chicken-like critters that did in the old man in Jurassic Park. Piece by piece we discover that the first teams investigating the object, labeled the “Dragonstar”, met with failure of Crichtonic proportions.
But that’s all been solved by this novel. Indeed, there are science outposts on and in the Dragonstar. We are cooperating with a semi-intelligent lizard species called the Saurians. Things are going so well that one haughty Colonel decides to film a documentary within the artifact and flies all sorts of dignitaries and fish-outta-water soon-to-be victims up to participate.
The back cover tells us that – quite suddenly and unexpectedly – the Saurians go mad and embark on a feeding frenzy. Simultaneously, the Dragonstar arms itself with some type of force shield and seals itself with the couple-hundred humans trapped inside with the hungry dinosaurs. And while all this is hitting the fan, the ships engines come to life, propelling the ship out of Earth orbit to – who knows where?
This happens about halfway in. The remainder details how the survivors survive, regroup and respond to this unfortunate series of events. It ends abruptly with none of the great questions answered. But at least two major characters don’t make it through alive, which is enough to keep the reader on his toes.
Truth be told, I was expecting a more bloodthirsty novel, based on what little I’ve read of Monteleone. I mean, Jurassic Park was almost a horror novel in the gruesome deaths foisted upon the main characters for their sins of pride. Hubris plays a big role in this book, too, so there’s justification in the couple of deaths by dinosaur fang. However, it was remarkably subdued, almost as if the authors were going for a G rating. Which is okay, I’m not gonna pout over being shorted on gore, but I thought the horror aspect could have been played up much more to the novel’s success.
Overall it was an interesting concept that’s not as juvenile as one might first think. Is the artifact a seeding vessel or is it a species retrieval probe? Conceivably, could not the human race construct such vessels five or ten thousand years hence, to travel the star lanes, automated robotic ships containing labs and DNA and whatnot, both seeding humanity on suitable alien worlds as well as bringing back whatever life it might find? If not five or ten thousand years, then certainly at twenty-five or fifty thousand, no?
Interesting …
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