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blchandler9000's review
2.0
I found some websites that let you download old pulp stories for the Kindle; this story was one I had found.
It's a fairly straight-forward pulpy kind of tale about a WWII warship that slips through a fault in time to the prehistoric past. Pterodactyls attack, they meet a few savages, and fall into conflict with some mutant-like men who fly plastic airplanes. I kept waiting for a clever twist or explanation for the various anachronisms and curiosities the story presented, but none ever came. It had pretty much every stereotype of the genre: manly man, the character-less girl, the brilliant scientist who is an expert on all subjects, the foreign villain, dinosaurs as mindless hulks of natural savagery, and a deus ex machina climax. It was just one of those stories where I sat there and thought, "You could have done so much more!" But maybe that's why this ended up a forgotten novella in a pulp magazine, and not one of the benchmarks of the genre.
(The sad thing is, I have kind of wanted to read this story for 20 years or so. In a dinosaurs-in-pop-culture book I have, the illustrations for this story were featured in a chapter on "Dinosaurs in Pulp Fiction". The images were pretty nice, by J. Allen St. John, one of the original illustrators for Edgar Rice Burroughs' novels. Finally, I got my hands on it, and it was something of a let-down.)
It's a fairly straight-forward pulpy kind of tale about a WWII warship that slips through a fault in time to the prehistoric past. Pterodactyls attack, they meet a few savages, and fall into conflict with some mutant-like men who fly plastic airplanes. I kept waiting for a clever twist or explanation for the various anachronisms and curiosities the story presented, but none ever came. It had pretty much every stereotype of the genre: manly man, the character-less girl, the brilliant scientist who is an expert on all subjects, the foreign villain, dinosaurs as mindless hulks of natural savagery, and a deus ex machina climax. It was just one of those stories where I sat there and thought, "You could have done so much more!" But maybe that's why this ended up a forgotten novella in a pulp magazine, and not one of the benchmarks of the genre.
(The sad thing is, I have kind of wanted to read this story for 20 years or so. In a dinosaurs-in-pop-culture book I have, the illustrations for this story were featured in a chapter on "Dinosaurs in Pulp Fiction". The images were pretty nice, by J. Allen St. John, one of the original illustrators for Edgar Rice Burroughs' novels. Finally, I got my hands on it, and it was something of a let-down.)
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