Dinosaur Four (SF/Time
Travel)
By Geoff Jones
ASIN #BOOKK1SU9W
Price $3.99
284 Pages
Rating 4-Stars
This review may contain spoilers. Ten people sitting in The Daily Edition Café suddenly
find themselves thrown together in the prehistoric past. The café and the ten
discover they have traveled back in time 67 million years, to the Cretaceous
Period where dinosaurs and giant crocodiles 40-feet long are a dangerous threat.
Finding part of the second-story room above still partially intact, they find
three bodies and a dying woman; she explains that her team had been attempting
invisibility, but somehow it backfired, causing a time warp. However, this
sounded strange, as she went on to explain everything they needed to know about
time travel, and that they had to find the missing football to take them back to the point of origin. Of course, she
knew where they were going, and that the land would be covered with a lot of
water. She also tells them there is a failsafe
in the football; once they return to the present, they can use the failsafe
to go back twenty minutes and stop the time travel incident. The bit about the
invisibility must have been a bunch of hokum.
The woman dies, then five of the ten are killed by
dinosaurs, a sixth is left in the past, and only four return, but the time
paradox doesn’t exactly work as planned, and T-Rex goes with them. If it had
worked as planned, supposedly none of the deaths would have occurred and the
café would never have disappeared.
This was a fun story, exciting and dangerously grim,
and I loved how well the author describes the land and scenery, as well as the
dinosaurs. My only disappointment with the book is the heavy language
throughout the narrative. As one character claims, “It’s only a word, man, it
doesn’t mean anything.” Still, good writing does not need to be peppered with
profanity to entertain. I highly recommend the book, but caution the reader if
they might be offended by a lot of profanity.
Tom Johnson
Author of Pangaea: Eden’s Planet
