Science Fiction Story Review David Drake Time Safari

SHORT SCIENCE FICTION STORY REVIEW – DAVID DRAKE – TIME SAFARI 1981 The Mammoth Book Of Short Science Fiction Novels. Before Jurassic Park, dinosaurs meeting and eating humans stories usually always-involved time travellers going back in time to see the great lizards.   Time Safari is one of the best such stories and deserves filming in its own right. The Safari is actually a hunt, with big game hunters and thrill seekers going back in time to collect dinosaur heads, and most hoping to bag themselves a Tyrannosaurus Rex head as a trophy. The Intrusion machine they travel by works well, and the tours have been run many times without problems. This time, virtually everything that can go wrong does, mostly due to human error and madness.  A rich millionaire has a promiscuous gun-loving wife who wants to go on the dinosaur hunt, so he tags along to keep an eye on her, but boasts of his prowess with big calibre hunting guns. He proves to be a coward, and eventually panics enough to try running back to the time machine itself, wrecking it as he and a dinosaur die together in a hail of bullets and fall onto its launch mechanism. Other tourists and hunters on one of the hovering shooting platforms crash and face a very desperate race for survival to get back to their camp although they don’t expect to ever return from the Cretaceous period. (Where dinosaurs did live, not in the Jurassic, by which time they were extinct). There are no time and history changing paradoxes here, just a sense of the folly of humans taking on nature at its most savage. This is a violent bloodbath story that will stay with you forever.  The ending will come as a genuine surprise.

Arthur Chappell