Author: Matthew Reilly
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
Errata:
page 42: "CJCJ" should be simply "CJ"
(page 53) - someone's getting miles and kilometers mixed up! Unless "metric miles" are shorter!
"A Chinese woman joined Hu on stage"? They're in China - why specify a 'Chinese' woman?!
The first thing I noticed about this novel was how many trees it was wasting! You can see form the sample page on my blog that only about 40% of the page is used for print - the rest is white space.
This is a chapter start page, so it leaves more white space than usual, and no one on in their right mind would try to suggest that every inch of the page be covered in minute text. Indeed, in ebooks, it's not even relevant, but if a book is going to run to a print version, then it's worth expending some thought - nboth by writers nad publishers in considering how many trees are going to die for this fiction to appear on a bookshelf in this era of catastrophic climate change. Every little helps.
That aside, let's look at the writing.
This novel, very much a redux of Jurassic Park (we even have male and female siblings, but in this case they're adults) is a somewhat different take on dragons. It’s set in contemporary times, and begins with a reptile expert, CJ Cameron, and some other people, including her brother, being sent on a visit to a zoo in China - a new zoo wrapped in secrecy. It turns out that the secrecy was because the zoo was set up solely for one type of animal: dragons!
An oddity about his novel is that it's replete with illustrations - not of the dragons, but of the facilities! There's even one illustration of a trace on a computer monitor! The illustrations were reasonably well done, but I'm not sure I got the point of them. It actually seemed rather insulting - that we readers wouldn’t be able to grasp what we were told, so here’s a pretty picture to help? Either that or the author wasn't sure of his ability to write adequate descriptive prose. It was just a little weird.
The worst thing for me however, was that the science was really poor. To begin with, the dragons are impossible even by fantasy standards. They come in three sizes, the smallest of which, we're told, weighs about a ton and the largest of which is the size of an airliner, yet despite these hefty sizes and weights, the dragons seem able to break the laws of physics and become airborne by means of inadequate and rather flimsy wings. The largest flying creatures of which we're aware were some species of the pterosaur order which have long been extinct. The biggest of these was only 150 pounds in weight (~68 kilos), and to get this human adult scale creature airborne, they required a wing-span approaching forty feet (~12 meters).
That's not even the most absurd part of it. These dragons are supposed to be related to dinosaurs, but they’re hexapods (the author got the prefix of the name right at least!): four legs plus two wings. The problem is that there's no precedent for hexapod vertebrates - let alone dinosaurs - on Earth, so the evolutionary history of these creatures is nonsensical at best. Your problem going into this then, is that you have to leave science at the door if you're going to have a hope of enjoying the story. That's not a nice thing to do to a reader, but it’s a requirement here.
We're told on page 87 that crocodiles are the only surviving members of the archosaur line (which includes dinosaurs and pterosaurs), but this is wrong. Even if we assume 'crocodiles' includes alligators, caimans, etc, this still excludes birds, which are also archosaurs. Despite the size of the pterosaurs, the largest creatures on earth have never been flying creatures, and herbivores tend to be large and grounded. What would be the point of their evolving an ability to fly when what they eat is on the ground and they're large enough to avoid being prey animals themselves? It made no sense. Ostriches, for example, are evolved from birds which could fly, but as soon as they grew large, they stopped flying.
The dragons' only "weakness" is saltwater, we're told, yet we’re offered no reason at all why a reptile would be scared of, or vulnerable to brine. It’s especially nonsensical given that we’re expressly told that one species loves water. Other than that, it seems that the dragons are larded-up with one super-duper trait after another to such an extent that the story becomes a pretty much a parody of itself. I fully expected one species to be named 'Mary Suasaurus'. These dragons don’t breath fire, but that's the only thing they don’t have. Had it been an Austin Powers story, they would undoubtedly have had lasers on their heads….
We’re told that they can see in pitch-darkness, which is completely ludicrous, tapetum lucidum or not. No being can see in pitch darkness if they're relying on an organ which processes light, since the definition of pitch-dark is that there's literally no light to process! If we’d been told that they can detect infra-red, or process sound, then that would be a different matter, but we’re specifically told that it's light.
Few people have truly experienced pitch-darkness because we’re such an energy-profligate world that there's always some stray light, spilling out from somewhere. Once, I was in a cave in Virginia and the guide had us hold onto the rail on the walkway as a reference point, and then she turned off all the lights. Now that's pitch darkness! You quite literally could not see your hand in front of your eye. The darkness felt almost like a substance you could actually grasp in your hands. It was downright creepy, and the reason for this is quite simply that we are not at all used to being without any light at all.
When CJ the "scientist" is told that dragons can see magically, she accepts this with a simple nod of her head. At that point I lost all faith in her credentials as a scientist! Neither does she have issues with the dragons having ampullae, which are the electrical organs which sharks, platypuses, and other aquatic creatures have, enabling them to detect living things by their electrical output. This only works in water, yet we’re expected to believe the dragons have them! Author Brad Thor is quoted on the cover describing this author as the king of hardcore action, and while that isn’t the same as science, it did make me seriously disinclined to read anything Brad Thor has written if he thinks this novel worth raving over.
It’s not just the science that's bad, unfortunately. Bad science with a good story might just be readable, but the story has dumb woven deeply into its fabric. One thing CJ does notice is that the dragons are being controlled by some kind of electronic pain-infliction device. We're later told that there's a chip grafted onto their brain which can send a signal directly to the pain center, so if a dragon tries to breach the electromagnetic dome within which they're confined, it gets hurt so badly that it will black out and plummet to the ground. This is supposed to teach them to stay within their confined area, but if you have an animal weighing upwards of a ton, and it blacks out while in flight and ends up plummeting to the ground, it’s not going to learn anything, because it will splat and that's the end of that! How come any of the dragons are still alive?
This is the kind of novel you end-up writing when you're so hell-bent on 'dramatic' that all it gets you is 'drama queen' (which is the ridiculous CJ saving the world single-handedly). Sometimes that can even work, but here it just makes me sad that something like this could get published, and the powers that be cynically expect it to sell because it's hitching a ride on the coat-tails of something much better that came before it.
Of course once you know that this is to be a cross between Jurassic Park and Jaws, you also know exactly what’s going to happen, so all of the mystery goes flying out of the window (as indeed do some of the characters). So what's left? Well the only things to look forward to would be original situations, really great characters, and humor, but none of that was evident in the part of this novel that I read (which was about one third of it).
The biggest problem once the creatures let loose is the same problem shared by all of this kind of predator story: why are the predators suddenly insatiably and perennially hungry, and why do they instantly think humans are prey and pursue them to a brain-dead extent when easier prey is readily available? It made no sense. Despite the animals being very well fed, they attack the humans for no reason and start to feed as though they've been starving for weeks. It makes especially little sense given that, as we’ve been inanely told, these dragons can 'hibernate' for a thousand years in their eggs! So at that point it pretty much fell apart completely for me.
The only thing which kept me reading - at least for a short while, was that we’ve also been told how intelligent these animals are, so I was curious to see if there was some other motive at play here other than the author's desire to simply write a gratuitously graphical blood and gore-fest of the quality of a B-grade slasher flick. It turned out to be the latter, because the writing made no more sense than such a picture does. For example, we’d been told earlier that the emperor dragons - the largest - are largely herbivorous, yet when the escaping group of humans encounters one, they're scared that it will eat them! Worse than this, it becomes very territorial yet it’s defending neither food nor mates!
I made it to page 117 and that was all I could stand to read. This novel was far too cartoonish to take seriously, and that's all there was to it.
