Open the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur!

Boom! Boom! Akkalakka-boom-boom!

Hands up who wants to see cave men fighting dinosaurs? Yep, that's pretty much everyone. The only problem is that millions of years separate cave men and dinosaurs making feasible combat unlikely. So how about, right, an alternative world in which the meteor that caused the K/T extinction never hit? In such a world cavemen could fight highly evolved, super-intelligent dinosaurs! And that would be even better! Harry Harrison's “West of Eden” is set in just such a world and delivers fantastic, enjoyable SF hokum together with top-notch caveman/dinosaur* action.

The book features 2 made up languages (one dinosaur, one human), which results in the kind of cheerful gibberish you really only get in SF books:

“It stood, it walked like it was human, Tanu. A murgu, father but it has hands like ours.”

“Commander, you will take 10 of your strongest crewmembers ashore at once. Armed with hesotsan. You will have the uruketo stand by here.” Great stuff.

The plot, well... the plot doesn't really matter, but it goes a bit like this: Humans and dinosaurs meet and it doesn't go well. The more advanced dinosaurs track down and eliminate a whole tribe of humans, except for one boy who the take as a research subject. This boy Kerrick, learns to speak dinosaur and eventually comes to be highly prized by their leader for his ability to say one thing and think another (the dinosaur language is based on their body language making it extremely difficult for them to lie to each other). Kerrick eventually escapes an uses his knowledge of dinosaur society to help the humans destroy the dinosaur city.

A word on dinosaur technology: dinosaurs are heavily into wet-ware having become masters of DNA manipulation to create life forms to use as tools (like Justina Robson's Forged but less cool). Trouble is, they don't use fire, or work metals, so I'm not sure how they got this technology in the first place. For example, they have created an artificial life form which is all googley eyes and lenses to use as a microscope, but before this was invented, how would they be able to see the structure of DNA and meddle with it in order to create the googley-eye-beast-microscope in the first place? There are chicken-and-egg problems there.

Another point which annoyed me repeatedly is that the author has used the word “sentience” when he means intelligence. As I understand it intelligence enables me to solve problems and perform complex tasks, while sentience is self awareness; sentience is the little voice in your head that's doing the director's commentary on your life. For example, he talks about light emitting plants which the dinosaurs use to guard the perimeter of their camps. Apparently these have been bred “sentient” to enable them to detect motion and light up attackers. They don't want sentience for that, intelligence will do! No-one wants a sentient weapon. Well, no one who's ever seen Dark Star...

West of Eden comes with the book equivalent of a DVD of extra material: dictionaries of human and dinosaur languages at the back of the book, a history of the world according to dinosaurs and notes on each of the different culture. I paid the exactly as much attention as I do DVD extras.

The review of a book which is such good fun should end on a upbeat note, so here goes: Cavemen! Dinosaurs! You have to imagine the furry thongs and bikinis yourself but any regular reader of SF will be able to do that without any trouble.

* I should point out that I do not mean “caveman slash dinosaur” in the sense of “slash fiction”. Well, except for one very wrong and mercifully brief scene...