mass market paperback, 202 pages
English language
Published Jan. 5, 1978 by Ballantine Books.
A crew is sent to Ireta to catalog fauna and flora, and search for new energy sources, but the results of their investigations are unexpected. Suddenly members of the crew begin to change and nobody knows what causes the change.
This is literally one of the most boring books I have ever read. It wasn't even bad in an amusing way, just really really dull.
Dinosaur Planet has been on my reading list for quite some time. I have a friend in the UK and we've been sending books off our bookcrossing wishlists to each other for about a dozen years or so (I've lost count.) He sent me this book for one of my birthdays in the early years.
Anne McCaffrey is an excellent writer. She always had strong female lead characters, no exception this book, and had an interesting view on life. I may need to go back through her other writings, but I noticed a strong vegetarian, vegan even, viewpoint in this book. Many times (at least once per chapter), the eating of animals is discussed and how atrocious it is is mentioned. No one who considers themselves civilized eats the flesh of an animal.
The first book of this duology was copyrighted in 1978. Like many books written at that time, …
Dinosaur Planet has been on my reading list for quite some time. I have a friend in the UK and we've been sending books off our bookcrossing wishlists to each other for about a dozen years or so (I've lost count.) He sent me this book for one of my birthdays in the early years.
Anne McCaffrey is an excellent writer. She always had strong female lead characters, no exception this book, and had an interesting view on life. I may need to go back through her other writings, but I noticed a strong vegetarian, vegan even, viewpoint in this book. Many times (at least once per chapter), the eating of animals is discussed and how atrocious it is is mentioned. No one who considers themselves civilized eats the flesh of an animal.
The first book of this duology was copyrighted in 1978. Like many books written at that time, the book is slow to start. It took me a long time to read this book. The story is well designed. The main characters have full personality, especially Varian. However, the supporting cast are not as well described.
Towards the end of the story, I was not following the scene changes well. I wanted to write this review while reading, but I also wanted to be sure that the vegan message carried through the entire story and that the ending did not somehow have the survivors eating animal flesh.
The first book is 189 pages and the second is 284 pages. For each book the story starts slow, speeds up in the middle, and slows down about three quarters of the way through, and then speeds up the last 10 percent. I was going to take a break between books but I wanted to see what happened in the 2nd book.
Overall, I highly recommend this book to fans of McCaffery, fans of classic science fiction, fans of strong female characters, fans of books with messages, and really anybody who might be remotely interested in reading this book.
