Stones To Stories: The Book List

Hello and welcome to the first episode of Season 2 of ‘The Pirates Don’t Eat The Tourists’. 

The subtitle this year is ‘Stones to Stories’ and I will be looking at how we went from fossil folklore to alien planets populated with dinosaurs and taking in a whole host of other exciting dinosaur tales. 

The season starts in earnest sometime in the Spring.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hello and welcome back to The Pirates of Dumpty the Tourists. I'm your host, Roman Squire. This is a podcast all about the dinosaurs and how we connect to them through the stories we tell. Last year I looked at the Jurassic series, speaking to a range of fans and experts about the films, and through that I suppose I was just trying to work out why that series means so much to me. This year I'm taking a slightly longer route, I'm going further back in time, to the very beginning, um, and tracing dinosaurs, their discovery, and the stories we've written to try and make sense of their existence. The first episode properly will start in spring, but I I wanted to put together this episode, which is a list of the books I will be looking at, and if you want to, and there's no expectation or test at the end, so don't worry, you can get a head start and read some of these along with me. Hopefully there's going to be some big hitters that you might have heard of or already read, but also some new ones to surprise you. There's a few on this list that are new to me as well. So let's just kick off, shall we? Um, the first book on the list, and is probably no surprise to anyone, but it's Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth from 1864. And I'll just read the back of the book. I've got the Penguin edition here, and it says Jules Verne's pioneering classic tells the story of the distinguished but eccentric Professor Lidenbrock. Uh excuse pronunciations here, who finds a scrap of parchment in an old manuscript. A cipher written in runes tells of an entrance to another world, a world hidden beneath our own. So with his nephew, reluctantly in tow, the professor follows this cryptic clue down into a dormant volcano. The further they descend, the more extraordinary are the creatures they encounter, the greater the dangers, and the more ancient the past that surrounds them. Mmm, so I remember I had an audiobook, audio cassette, of this, and the story has an epic battle between a plesiosaur and an ichthyosaur. Not dinosaurs, I know, but those two species are incredibly important, I think, and important finds at this time that help us tell the story of prehistoric animals and the world that came before us. And so this is one of the oldest books that I'll be looking at. It'll also be interesting to unpack how it stands up against other Victorian uh prehistoric books, um, and more on that actually in the series properly. So next up is Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World from 1912. And let's just read the back of that book. I've got the Oxford University Press edition. Headed by the larger than life figure of Professor Challenger, a scientific expedition sets out to explore a mysterious plateau in the Amazon rainforest. The adventurers find themselves trapped in a world lost in time, inhabited by dinosaurs and ape men. They too must take part in an ancient struggle for survival. Arthur Conan Doyle's classic tale of adventure and discovery remains a witty and enthralling as when it was first appeared in 1912. And this edition comes with introduction, textual notes, bibliography, chronology, and explanatory notes as well. And this will be very exciting to dig into. And there's I think there's a lot of connection between saying like that, it's not a completely obvious statement, but between Doyle and Crichton, and not just because of um Crichton using the title The Lost World for his sequel to Jurassic Park. But they were both authors who wanted to write about up-to-date scientific discoveries or ideas. They wanted to be at the forefront or even ahead of what science was going to do, but package that up into entertainment. And it's making these things palatable. It's making those because when dinosaurs were discovered, it created a lot of riffs across the country between the creationists and also evolution with Charles Darwin. So writing about dinosaurs wasn't a straightforward thing to do, I don't think. I mean, I'll explore all this, but it's how you make these ideas palatable and entertaining that then might lead to scientific change. I don't know, but we'll see. And uh Arthur Conan Doyle is an interesting person to talk about, as is the next person on my list, which is Edgar Rice Burroughs. And his 1918 book, The Land That Time Forgot. Let's have a little read of the back. Bowen Tyler's adventure began with a terror haunted trip as a captive in an enemy submarine. It ended on the rocky shores of a lost world, an unmapped land forgotten by the rest of humanity, where the beasts and beast men of the Stone Age still lived and fought as they had hundreds of thousands of years ago. What was what was the secret of this mysterious continent where time apparently had stopped and where dinosaurs, saber toothed tigers, and ape men still struggled for their lives with tooth and claw. The Land That Time Forgot is an epic imagination and science fiction adventure by the creator of Tarzan of the Apes. I've got a wonderful uh for the actual physical copies, I'm gonna put them on my Instagram because I've got an ace science fiction classic here, which is tiny and it's a beautiful little beautiful little paperback. Um a lot of I have I have read this and there is so much clearly that he's taking from Arthur Conan Doyle. But he has a few other interesting things, slightly problematic things that he also throws into his books, all of his books actually. Um my first connection with The Land That Time Forgot is through a series of 1970s, I think they're by Amicus, and they are they're a hell of a lot of fun. You know, then they're dinosaurs between the Ray Harryhausen and your Jurassic Park, really, which is these weird rubber creatures, animatronics that are nowhere near Stan Winston's level. There's a the it's his his other series, which is uh at the Earth's core, loads of uh books in that series. The film version of that, whenever a dinosaur falls off anything or is shot, they just randomly explode because who doesn't like a massive explosion in a film um in the 1970s? If you if you can watch them, please do. They're they're a lot of fun. Um, and then we move forward quite a bit in time, and I'm interested to try and see what else I can dig into between 1918 and actually Ray Bradbury in the 1960s, uh, and his dinosaur tales. Now, probably his most famous of these is The Sound of Thunder. Now he's an author that I'm not particularly familiar with, unfortunately, but he seems to have a bit of an obsession with dinosaurs. And actually, there's a book that I'm just about to talk to and uh talk about in a little bit that has a quote by um Bradbury on it. Um, again, a dinosaur book, and he seems to, yeah, uh I'm I'm interested to see how he changes up the ideas, adds in those science fiction elements a bit more heavily, perhaps, to Edgar Ice Burroughs and everybody that's come before. Yeah, so I'm interested to read his um stories, the The Dinosaur Tales, but particularly focusing on the sound of thunder. Then we move forward a little bit more to the late 70s and again further into this science fiction and dinosaurs in science fiction, and Anne McCathry, who was you know an absolute sci-fi titan with her Dragon Riders of Pern series, and in the late 70s, she wrote two novels about dinosaurs, um, the Dinosaur Planet series, um, 1978's Dinosaur Planet and its 1984 sequel, Dinosaur Planet Survivors. I've got the 2001 Omnibus edition here, and this is what it says on the back. Dinosaur Planet and Survivors, two thrilling adventures from the best-selling author of the classic Pern series now available in a single volume. On Earth they died out 70 million years ago, but on the jungle world of Irita, they still rule in all their terrible splendour. As strange as any in the galaxy, this is Dinosaur Planet. When the expedition sent to explore this new world finds themselves trapped on the surface and the relief ship disappears, it is only the beginning of their troubles, for the heavy worlders among them are turning hostile and systematically hunting down their colleagues. Only the frozen sleep of Cryogenics offers any escape. But for how long? Well. And Anne McCathery is somebody who is is is an interesting voice in this sphere, and also the off-world dinosaurs. Why are they off-world? Let's see why they exist on this other planet. And then up next is a book from 1984, and that's Carnosaur. That's by author Harry Adam Knight, but that's actually a pseudonym of Australian author John Brosnan. Uh, I know the film, but I've never read this book. Um, I'm really interested to see its connections between it and Jurassic Park, because I feel like there's some connection with the scientific reasons for bringing dinosaurs back, why they're bringing them back, and how they bring them back as well. I think there's some connections there. And of course, then that leads me on. I will be covering Critons 2 Jurassic books again. Uh, I'll never tire of reading or talking about them, so I'm excited to actually get some different people on to those episodes and to get them to share their thoughts about the books and how they feel they connect to the wider fiction that there is about dinosaurs. Then we have the Dinotopia series by James Gurney to cover, and I'll be chatting to Stephen Ray Morris and Samantha Rendrez for that episode. So very excited about that, digging into the digging into the world between uh Jurassic Park and the novel and the film coming out, and how Dinotopia approaches humans' relationships to extinct animals and to dinosaurs in a very different way. So yeah, I think that's that's gonna be an interesting one, and also looking at the adaptations of that as well and how they come out during the boom in in the 80s of dinosaurs in in fiction and on TV as well and film. Then we have a very interesting book, and actually the first time I read this was last year, and that's Raptor Red by paleontologist Robert T. Barker. And well, let's let's just read uh the the back for a moment. Um 120 million years ago on the plains of prehistoric Utah, a pair of fierce but beautiful eyes look out from the dull green undergrowth of conifers that bound the edges of the mud flats and riverbeds. They belong to Raptor Red, a female raptor dinosaur. Her story opens with tragedy. She and her mate are stalking a giant Astrodon, silently and with deadly force, but at the moment of triumph, Raptor Red's mate is killed. I'm gonna stop here because uh as I'm skimming down this, this is actually the entire don't actually entire plot of the book. Why would you why do you even need to read this? Um I will I will stop there as where the where the blurb of this doesn't. It's uh again interesting to see then the science, and you know, because Jurassic Park really was the first time, I think I talked about this last year, the first time that scientifically accurate dinosaurs as we knew them in 1993, and only part partially, you know, I know I'm no paleontologist, but some of the depictions of the animals, like the T-Rex, behavior no, but look is pretty much what we know of the T-Rex at that point. So it's interesting then to have a paleontologist come in, and you know, he was a a a foundational paleontologist in terms of dinosaur discovery and dinosaurs in the public consciousness. So it'll be interesting to look at him as a person as well as this, his sole fiction outing, and why he decided to write it. And then also another one, and this is the one with the Ray Bradbury quote on the front. This is from 1998, and this is Greg Bear's Dinosaur Summer. Now, this is something I didn't know about at all, but it is, and there are actually quite a few of these sequels to Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. But this is one that received quite a lot of praise at the time, so the back of it is Return to the Lost World. A vast range of giant reptiles thought to have been extinct since the Mesozoic era, have in fact survived in isolation for 70 million years on the hidden plateau of El Grande, Venezuela. Professor Challenger found their lost world, the rotting tropical regions of hell. Creatures of legend were brought north as circus exhibits, caged and of only passing interest. Fifty years and two world wars later, Lothar Gluck's Dinosaur Circus is the last of its kind. Dinosaur Summer is the amazing story of the return of the prehistoric beasts to their ancestral home, to Venezuela and freedom. Lotha Gluck is taking his dinosaurs home. And Ray Bradbury says, If you love dinosaurs, dinosaur summer is your cup of Jurassic tea. Tea? Hell, it's a banquet. That's high praise. I haven't read this, but this is a very interesting alternate um 1940s. And the stuff that it is dealing with, which is what I gleaned from the back of this, is the thing that we get in the Jurassic World films. This disinterest with dinosaurs. This is dinosaurs have been found and have been in our world for 50 years in the in this novel, and then people just give up on them. So what do you do with them? And it seems that this is all about returning them to their natural environment. I'm interested to see how that how that plays into also the films that we've we've had and that that story that we've had as well play out. Now we have a bit of a curveball here, which is the first book uh of the 21st century, and that is Stephen Baxter's evolution. Um it is the story of life on Earth, so not it's not solely just about dinosaurs, but it's 565 million years of the story of Earth. So it does go into the far future as well. And I'm just interested with this story of of how dinosaurs are used to tell the story of our planet, how much do they feature, um, because there's an interesting story about humanity and actually how long we've been on this planet, and it is a dot compared to the rest of the rest of life that we've had. And actually, on the Terrible Lizards podcast, um, David Hone on there said, you know, that actually the the dinosaur age hasn't ended because of birds. So I'm interested to think about a world where maybe aliens are looking down at our planet and assessing how you would tell that story. Because why would humans feature so much? Actually, maybe sort maybe this is a dinosaur planet, as and Catherine writes about, but that would be the predominant life, surely. It would be the evolution from the dinosaurs that we know, the T-Rexes, the Triceratops, to your seagull and your ostrich. They've been around far longer than us. But enough, I'm talking far too much about that before I actually talk about that book. And then to end the series, nearly at the end now, I've got two of the most recent books, really, which is from 2017. And they also feature the military. Um there's Ethan Peters' Primitive War and Lee Murray's Into the Mist. Two books. Um I read Primitive War first time last year, also reviewed the film last year as well. So I'm interested to reread that, also look at the follow-up books that he's done. And Lee Murray as well, her books. I think there's four in that series. And I'm sure that they'll be new to loads of people. Um, that uh that's that story as well. And just before my voice goes, let's have a quick sip of tea. That is the list of books. So the first episode won't be about a book, it'll be about the discovery of the animals, going back to the folklore around fossils, up to the creation of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, local communities on how they first discovered dinosaurs here in Bex Hill. I've got the dinosaur footprints already recorded at the Bex Hill Museum with their wonderful curator Julian, and then how that leads into the first book in the series, which is Journey to the Centre of the Earth. And how the series will be packaged might be slightly different to last year as well. I want to try and get out a little bit more, take my recorder, and go to places where these stories have some meaning. Um so, like Arthur Conan Doyle, who doesn't actually didn't live far away from me when he wrote The Lost World. He wrote about finding fossils. So let's uh I'm gonna see if I can go out and see if I can go and find those those fossils that he that he found that inspired The Lost World. I will of course then have you know guests on to talk about the books, but there might also be some solo episodes as well. So quite when the first episode truly, you know, the first proper episode will drop is still up in the air. But that's exciting, you know. This is this is as much me going on that journey to discover the origins of of dinosaurs and fiction and how that leads us to Jurassic Park and and what came after as well. To cover the gap between this episode going out and my first proper episode, I'm going to be putting out every two weeks a sort of best of look at last year's series, recording some new narration, also digging out some clips that I didn't have time to put into those episodes, and you know, telling telling the story of the seven Jurassic Park films and some ideas about um that people had um and shared with me last year. Now there's bound to be some that I've forgotten or have left off by mistake, but that's where you come in. Over on Instagram at Jurassic Pirates Pod, I will have a pinned post with the list of books that I'll be covering. So just comment under that post with your suggestions. And at the end of the season, I will be compiling an episode based upon that list and also other books I design. Discover along the way. But for now, I'll just say thank you so much for listening and goodbye.