Who Goes There?

I don’t know much about David Drake, although if you browse enough of Baen Books you’ll find him a familiar name before long. Drake was one of the original Baen regulars, appearing in the ’70s when Jim Baen was editor of Galaxy Science Fiction, then later became a regular author and editor at Baen Books. As you can guess, Drake is a Vietnam war veteran (he was in the army, specifically) and this experience, like with certain other SF authors of his generation (looking at you, Joe Haldeman), very much informed his writing. Historically Drake is of fine importance as he was one of the pioneers of military SF as we now recognize it. “Time Safari,” while not military SF exactly, does evoke imagery from a certain war.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1981 issue of Destinies, which is on the Archive. You may notice a discrepancy: the people over at the Archive have it listed as the Spring 1981 issue. Truth is that this, the last issue of Destinies, is undated, but the people at ISFDB have it listed as August and, given that’s the month of publication inside the issue itself, I’m going with that; mind you, ISFDB classifies Destinies as an anthology series when really it’s a magazine that simply has an unusual format. Destinies was Baen’s first (and apparently most successful) attempt at a “paperback magazine,” a mass market paperback that has the contents of a magazine, including an editorial, a science department, a book review column, etc., and it even has issue numbers. Anyway, you can find “Time Safari” in the collection of the same name, as well as a few others, most recently the Drake collection Dinosaurs & a Dirigible; and yes, that last one is a Baen publication.

Enhancing Image

The cast of “Time Safari” is a bit crowded, so I’ll get names out of the way first before we get into the action. You basically have the safari staff and the tourists, with the important members of the former being Henry Vickers, Our Hero™, and Don Washman, a helicopter pilot; for the tourists we have the McPhersons, who are siblings and whose first names I don’t think we even get, and then the big ones, Jonathan and Adrienne Salmes, one of the bitterest married couples in all of fiction. The Salmes are a double-edged sword in that they’re more or less responsible for the plot (no Salmes, no story), but I also have issues with how Drake writes them. There’s a lot to say about some of these characters, good and bad.

The premise of “Time Safari” was not new, even in 1981; certain readers may recall L. Sprague de Camp’s “A Gun for Dinosaur” and Brian Aldiss’s “Poor Little Warrior!” from the ’50s, and there are probably examples from even earlier that I can’t think of right now. The idea of going back in time to hunt dinosaurs is basic, arguably problematic, and yet it’s a well that has been returned to again and again over the decades—I suspect because, while it doesn’t challenge the mind, it does lend itself to entertainment. The time travel project at the heart of “Time Safari” is backed by the Israeli government, and I can at least appreciate the move to make said government come off as a little shady. Totally unrelated, but I have to wonder if Vickers (who, mind you, is an American expat) would be as comfortable to work under a more overtly fascist Ben Netanyahu.

Vickers himself is a bit of an anti-hero. By his own admission he would’ve been trading ivory in darkest Africa had he lived in the 19th century, and surely the phantom of imperialism goes a way to explain his contentment to deal with whiny upper-class customers in the jungles of the Cretaceous. Of course, basically working in customer service myself, I’m inclined to sympathize with Vickers despite some rather questionable decisions he makes later in the story. Sad the same can’t be said for literally any other character. The McPhersons are fine I guess, but they’re a two-for-one deal and frankly it’s easy to get the two confused. The gunners (there are, if I remember right, two guides, two pilots, and two gunners on the staff) are mostly there to act as boisterous assholes, and the guides and pilots are there to act as Clement-esque figures of reason.

There’s a whole lot of explaining in this novella.

But then there are the Salmes. Jonathan is bad news for everybody pretty much every time he shows up, and he almost certainly suffers from some unnamed mental illness; his wife is not a whole lot better. Adrienne, who unlike her husband seems in total control of her mental faculties, gets the ball rolling by humiliating her husband in front of the whole safari group, being pretty open about the fact that she’s an adulterer. Now, I’m by no means one of those puritans who thinks adultery is a crime, but it’s more that Adrienne’s treatment of her husband is so obviously abusive that the fact that she never gets held accountable for this is a bit troubling. I’m getting ahead of myself here, but Adrienne is the closest the story has to a villain, although strangely Drake does not frame her as being thus.

I guess the more immediate problem is that Jonathan is a cuck with a screw loose who is both a coward and desperate to prove his wife wrong. “But Vickers was irritated to realize that it also bothered him that Don Washman and Mrs. Salmes seemed to be getting along very well together.” Maybe you can see where this is going. The interpersonal drama is the heart of “Time Safari,” which I guess makes sense since this is a 30,000-word novella and we can’t just have dinosaur-hunting action (although that does take up a good portion of the word count), but what holds me back from enjoying it more is that the characters are, by and large, both unlikable and unrelatable. No, I’m not saying every character in a work of fiction has to be a beacon of morality or that a character’s motives have to be totally understandable; it’s more that if you want readers to get invested in your love pentagon or whatever that they ought to get invested in the characters first.

A word on the mechanics of time travel as presented here. This is a case of being able to travel into the past but not into the future; there are no encounters with Eloi and Morlocks, sadly. The safari enters the Cretaceous via an insersion vehicle, a convoluted setup involving a helicopter for airborne shooting plus a couple of “ponies,” which are basically small tanks that can also serve as watercraft. Why the Cretaceous? My guess is that it was the period home to the biggest land carnivores the world has ever seen, plus sauropods in certain part of the world; and yes, we have a tyrannosaur. I say “tyrannosaur” because I don’t think we get a T. rex proper here, but rather a “gorgosaur,” a smaller cousin to the T. rex. Drake uses certain names for dinosaurs which probably referred to specific species circa 1980 but which now read as confusing, due to advances in our undertanding of dinosaurs. As is often the case with dinosaur media, carnivores (especially large theropods) are overrepresented, to the point where there seems to be a carnivore-herbivore imbalance. We have a few tyrannosaurs (which is more than I was expecting) but we also have a pack of “dromaeosaurs,” which we know to be raptors—although they’re not Velociraptors, of course.

Being that this piece of dinosaur media is now four decades old, be prepares for some rather gross inaccuracies. The interiors (the illustrator for “Time Safari” is sadly uncredited) give very much the impression of dinosaurs in the pre-Jurassic Park mode, i.e., as swamp creatures, with theropods being drawn as having upright statures as opposed to the far more practical horizontal orientation of the spine that would become mainstream with Jurassic Park. At the very least Drake does depict the tyrannosaur as a carnivore that would recognize, and probably get most of its nutrition from, carrion. We also get ceratopsians, although not the Triceratops specifically (it’s a Torosaurus if I remember right). We even get a prehistoric crocodile, which like everything else is fucking massive, althoughin terms of physiology it’s very similar to modern crocodiles; be sure to put a pin in this last one.

There Be Spoilers Here

Everything goes to shit when Jonathan Salmes sabotages the helicopter, upon discovering Adrienne’s affair with Washman, and later steals the insersion vehicle—at the cost of his own life. The back end of the story sees Vickers, Adrienne, and Washman separated from the rest of the team as they have to deal with a wrecked chopper, a pissed tyrannosaur, and a good deal of FIRE. Adrienne doesn’t find out about Jonathan’s death until later and it’s not even directly brought up in the short epilogue, which I thought was conspicuous. Vickers and Adrienne have to drag around an injured Washman as they get back to base, where along the way the two get into a weird and not totally convincing affair of their own—not helped by the fact that Washman is RIGHT THERE (albeit unconscious) the whole time. That Adrienne is a terrible person gives Vickers some pause but he relents on the grounds that, despite her bitchery, Adrienne is shockingly good at taking care of herself in the wild. I can’t say I buy Drake’s attempt at making Adrienne appear to be less of a shitty person than she really is.

We actually get two deus ex machinas for the price of one in the climax, as the tyrannosaur that’s been going after the trio gets fucking wrecked by a crocodile that nearly dwarfs it in size. (Well you know what they say, there’s always a bigger fish…) The second and slightly more ludicrous deus ex machina comes when the insersion vehicle gets returned to where it was before, despite Vickers being convinced that you can’t return exactly to the time and place where you last jumped off—something that was vaguely alluded to early in the story but which more feels like a rabbit that Drake has pulled out of a hat. By this point Vickers and Adrienne have taken a liking to each other; if I was in Vickers’s position I would decline, if only because Adrienne’s late husband met a very bad end and, truth be told, I get black widow vibes from her. Still, despite a couple deaths (which I feel like would involve a lot of red tape, but Drake bypasses this), the safari team is rescued and Vickers and Adrienne volunteer to be guinea pigs for the Israeli government’s time travel shenanigans—which I assume is what turns this into an episodic series, but I’m not sure.

A Step Farther Out

I’m curious about reading more Drake, but weirdly I’m not so curious about checking out more of this series in particular. True, the kid in me goes apeshit for anything dinosaur-related by default (even bad and/or woefully outdated dinosaur media), but “Time Safari” is not how I would’ve handled the material personally. If Drake had written his human characters with more empathy I think it would’ve improved the story considerably. If you want dinosaur-hunting action then chunks of the novella will scratch that itch, but it’s also lacking in that sense-of-wonder touch that defines so much of dinosaur media—I suspect intentionally, except that it doesn’t quite venture into the nihilism of, say, Aldiss’s “Poor Little Warrior!” Speaking of which, Aldiss’s story got its point across in half a dozen pages, whereas I do think Drake could’ve streamlined “Time Safari,” namely its cast of characters, and made it a shorter, punchier novella.

See you next time.