Robert J Sawyer. He's my man. He's one of the few science fiction authors writing today who actually make sure their science checks out. But he sticks mostly to 10 years from now instead of several hundred. So far I haven't read one of his books that made me think "boy, was he off his game there."
In "End of an Era" two palentologists climb into a time machine and go back to see what killed the dinosaurs. There's a bit of uncertainty in the mechanism so they go back knowing they could a few thousand years too early or too late. They find an Earth with two moons, roughly one-third of modern gravity, and with many of the dinosaurs being occupied by an intelligent blue sludge from Mars. Simce Mars is dead in our time they have to make a decision about whether or not the martians should be brought forward in time to prevent their extinction.
Meanwhile, in an alternate timeline the time machine project never was. The main character finds strange entries in his diary written by him 65 million years ago and starts to investigate.
Spoilers can be found in the comments.
He does a wonderful job of explaining the different theories about what killed the dinosaurs and what's wrong with the asteroid theory. He does a Jurassic Park quality job of talking about the dinosaurs. Except for the time machine and martians he plays it straight and has done the research to keep it accurate.
I highly recommend this and anything by Robert J. Sawyer.
1 comment:
The blue slime is a viral lifeform. It lives to conquer. They're on Earth to take the dinosaurs to fight beings on a planet in what's now the asteroid belt. These beings are fighting to keep from being enslaved by the slimes.
Gravity is low because of special gravity control satellites in geosynchronous orbit. When our heroes turn the satellites off normal gravity returns, the slimes get squished, and all large animals (i.e. dinosaurs) collapse under their own weight and die. That's how the dinosaurs went extinct.
With this set right the best we can figure is that other time travellers from the far distant future sabotaged the time travel program so now that it's done the job they wanted it to do it couldn't do any more damage. (yeah, I didn't like that bit either)
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