dinosaurs attacking a crashed space shipI got this from the library because I read the Livejournal of one of the authors (Ryk E. Spoor, otherwise known as “seawasp”). I read his journal because I used to enjoy his posts on rec.arts.sf.written back before Usenet became more noise than signal. I’d never read any of his fiction and one day decided that was dumb and put a hold on this, the only book of his in my library. I would never have picked the book up based on the cover. I don’t know if you can tell from that little thumbnail, but it depicts a pack of dinosaurs tearing into a crashed spaceship. Dinosaurs and spaceships together don’t really push my buttons. Plus I’d never read Eric Flint and had some vague association that he wrote military SF, another sub-genre that doesn’t turn my crank.

The book starts off on a paleontology dig in our near future where a totally new fossilized animal is found alongside some better-known dinosaurs. Adding to the interest is that it’s found right on the K-T boundary (the stratum between the Cretaceous and Tertiary Periods. Right on the line where mammals started taking over from the reptiles.

The rest of the book concentrates on two different efforts to make a manned flight to Mars, one by NASA, another by a private company. At first glance these two story lines don’t seem to have anything to do with each other, but Flint and Spoor do a fine job of slowly revealing the connection.

The disparate disciplines also provide a nice array of characters. There are paleontologists and engineers and astronauts (and paleontologist engineer astronauts!), all believably smart and quirky and human. And there are the politics of all of those disciplines to mix things up.

So if you see the book, ignore the cover and know that inside is a hard SF book that takes an interesting poke at some of the big unknown questions in several disciplines. Very fun!