Bone Wars
Brett Davis
Baen
Fiction, Sci-Fi
Themes: Aliens, Dinosaurs
**
Description
In the late 1870's, rival paleontologists Edward Cope and O. C. Marsh work the barren Montana wilderness, hunting for fossils. The pickings are mighty slim, since a third man who calls himself Alf Swenson seems to be getting to them all first. He employs technology far in advance of anything available at the time: invisible walls, an odd metal "tent," and the ability to lift the fossils straight out of the rock without so much as a shovel. Another stranger, calling himself Greig, claims to be Swenson's rival, and both try to recruit Cope and Marsh against the other. It soon becomes apparent that Swenson and Greig are not of this world, and have their own motivations for wanting dinosaur bones. To complicate matters, the Sioux leader Sitting Bull is making a detour to the area for his own reasons, which has the resident Crow agitated.
Review
After reading this, I wanted to ask, among other things, just why Davis felt compelled to write this story. Furthermore, why did he take Cope, Marsh, and various other real-life historical figures, and throw them into a lousy sci-fi plot that never goes anywhere? Who knows? As a humble reader, I don't have a clue, even after reading it. Some people have a knack for including actual people in alternate reality tales, but not Davis. Maybe if he'd just made up a couple of scientists and Indians, it wouldn't have been as boring, but I doubt it. There just wasn't much to this book. None of the characters came across as real people, and all of the situations were forced. I found the explanation rushed and entirely unsatisfactory. (I saw a sequel on the shelves, Two Tiny Claws, which drags P. T. Barnum into the unholy mess; this might explain the lousy ending, but doesn't do much to redeem the book in the ratings.) I think it's going in with the next batch of books to sell to Half-Price Books, so I can save shelf space for more deserving titles.