Who Goes There?

A recurring thing that I totally did not intend with the author selected for this marathon thus far is that these people lived a long time. Fritz Leiber died at 81, Kurt Vonnegut died at 84, Katherine MacLean died at 94, and so on. About as impressive as MacLean’s longevity, and in some ways even more so, is that of L. Sprague de Camp, who was born in 1907 and died in 2000, being more or less active from 1937 until his death. De Camp technically entered the field before John W. Campbell took over Astounding, but he quickly became one of Campbell’s court jesters, his early fiction often being comedic in tone. He was a forerunner to what we now call hard SF, with a keen eye for historical and scientific accuracy (his first solo novel, Lest Darkness Fall, was a major inspiration for alternate history writers to come), or at least as he saw those things. Unlike most of the rest of Campbell’s stable in the late ’30s through the ’40s, de Camp was just as comfortable if not more so writing fantasy, which made him, along with (God help us) stablemate L. Ron Hubbard, an ideal fit for the short-lived fantasy magazine Unknown. Like a chameleon, de Camp would change his colors as the market demanded it, such that he was able to still thrive as the field changed radically in the ’50s. “A Gun for Dinosaur” is, on the one hand, an adventure story that harks back to the writings of H. Rider Haggard, but it’s also a grim cautionary tale that probably would not have seen print in Astounding. This is a rare case where I had heard the X Minus One adaptation long before reading the source material, which gave the impression, going in, that this would be a more straightforward story than it is.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1956 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in The World That Couldn’t Be and 8 Other Novelets from Galaxy (ed. H. L. Gold), Dawn of Time: Prehistory Through Science Fiction (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Joseph Olander, and Robert Silverberg), Dinosaurs! (ed. Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois), Timescapes: Stories of Time Travel (ed. Peter Haining), The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century (ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Harry Turtledove), The World Turned Upside Down (ed. Jim Baen, David Drake, and Eric Flint), and the de Camp collections Rivers of Time and The Best of L. Sprague de Camp.

Enhancing Image

As you can guess, “A Gun for Dinosaur” is about using a time machine to hunt dinosaurs, since the big game of our current world has been all but exhausted and rich white dudes with guns have gotten bored with shooting lions, elephants, and black people for sport. The story takes place in presumably what would’ve then been the present day, but our narrator, Reginald Rivers, is a man who seems to be stuck outside of his time and place, having more in common with Allan Quatermain than a modern-day Englishman (for he is very English), being quite burly even in his middle age. De Camp tells the story in technically the second person, since Rivers is talking to one Mr. Seligman, whom we never hear a word from because Seligman is in the place of the reader, the result being that Rivers is narrating to us as if we were a character in the story. We know upfront that Rivers survives the adventure he’s about to tell us about, which even in the 1950s would’ve been thought of as an old-fashioned narrative technique; but it serves a purpose. The tension comes from the fact that while we know Rivers made it out alive, the same does not go for everyone who was around Rivers at the time, hence his telling this story to Seligman so as to why he refuses to take him on a trip hunting big dinosaurs. We’re introduced thus to two men who went on this trip, Courtney James and August Holtzinger, and given Rivers’s tone we can gather that something bad happened with these men, although we’re not told exactly what. We also have the Raja, an Indian hunter who functions as Rivers’s partner and fellow guide. So we have four characters who really matter, and we have our premise.

Since “A Gun for Dinosaur” is not an obscure story I decided to look up what other people have said about it after reading it for myself, and was a bit dismayed to find James Wallace Harris had already done a pretty thorough review of it, even bringing up a few points that I was going to as well. Turns out I’m not unique at all in thinking de Camp had probably written this story in response to Ray Bradbury’s even more famous “A Sound of Thunder,” which had been published a few years earlier. Both stories involve hunting dinosaurs for sport and how this might leads to issues with time travel, not to mention extreme risk for the hunter. For those of you who forgot, “A Sound of Thunder” (oh yeah, spoilers) is about a dumbass with money who goes back in time to hunt a T. rex, although he’s supposed to stay on a set path lest he causes the butterfly effect to kick in. Naturally he goes off the path and kills a butterfly, which somehow has a domino effect on what would be the present day. I’ve always found this to be implausible, since I could never for the life of me make sense of how this one innocuous event could have changed the future so radically; but then you could argue that’s the whole point of the butterfly effect: unintended consequences. I think it’s lazy writing on Bradbury’s part, though, since it feels like he’s asking the reader to do the author’s job for him. De Camp seemed to think the same thing, since he really goes out of his way to explain the mechanics of time travel in “A Gun for Dinosaur.” No butterfly effect here. The rules of the time safari (yes, one story that clearly took notes from de Camp’s is David Drake’s “Time Safari,” which I reviewed a hot minute ago) are pretty clear. The real question, then, is left up to human error.

James and Holtzinger suffer from cases of hubris, but in different ways. Neither of them is an experienced hunter, but whereas James in it for the sake of thrill-saking, Holtzinger did it because he’s a pretty average guy who wants to do something truly risky for once in his life. I feel like there are better ways of averting existential dread that going off hunting dinosaurs, but you do you. But basically Holtzinger means well. James, not so much. Not only is James even more incompetent with handling weaponry and hunting gear than Holtzinger, but he also seems to have a screw loose. (I’ve read enough “time travel dinosaur-hunting” stories to figure that one surefire trope is the affluent white man who has some undiagnosed mental illness.) Rivers, in telling this story to us, goes into quite a bit of detail about what it takes to go on one of these trips, especially the physical brunt of it—that being the main reason why women are not allowed. So yeah, both the story and the private company that hosts these safaris are sausage fests. James tries bribing his way into taking his mistress along for the ride, but Rivers wisely refuses; this ended up being good for both Rivers and the mistress, who very likely would not have survived. As you can see, there’s a bit of racism and sexism on display, although there’s some plausible deniability as to how much of it is Rivers’s and how much de Camp’s, not to mention that it does (unfortunately) make sense, given the rather heavy inspiration taken from Victorian-era adventure fiction.

You may be wondering, then, what makes “A Gun for Dinosaur” worth recommending to this day, since there are quite a few old-timey readers and authors who still swear by it. The key is at least twofold: the foreboding tone, which is established from the very beginning, and also de Camp’s attention to detail. As someone who’s been obsessed with dinosaurs since my earliest childhood, I firstly found interest in “A Gun for Dinosaur” as a snapshot of how we understood the prehistoric world some seven decades ago, long before Jurassic Park caused a profound increase in people becoming paleontologists. Paleontology was still a very niche discipline in 1956, and de Camp, while not a paleontologist himself, gave the field as much respect as he gave any of the other hard sciences, which is to say quite a bit. Granted that the science is laughably outdated, the world of the mid-Cretaceous as depicted in-story is remarkably consistent. The dinosaurs, from the big theropods (there’s a tyrannosaur, although Rivers is quick to point out it is not specifically a T. rex) to the duck-billed parasaurolophus, are thoroughly lizard-like, in both how they move and how they think. The speculation that dinosaurs, especially the theropods, were at least if not more akin to birds than reptiles was still a few decades off. Dinosaurs in this story, including the tyrannosaur, are lumbering brutes with shit for brains, who have to be shot in the heart rather than the head in order to go down. Rivers recommends using the comically large .600-caliber hunting rifle to take down the tyrannosaur, the sheer weight and kickback of the gun being a big reason why people under a certain weight and musculature are prohibited. This is, quite literally, not a game for lightweights.

There Be Spoilers Here

We know a tyrannosaur will show up, and so it does. The hunters’ efforts to take down the tyrannosaur ends up being a disaster, with Hortzinger sacrificing himself to save James’s “worthless life,” getting carried off by the big dinosaur screaming. It’s a rather disturbing sequence, in no small part because Rivers and the Raja try tracking down the wounded tyrannosaur in the hopes of at least recovering Hortzinger’s body; but alas, the trail of blood soon runs cold, with the tyrannosaur and its prey having seemingly vanished into the wilderness. This is the kind of casualty that would probably result in a lawsuit, if not for legal protections that hunting preserves pull in order to relieve themselves of responsibility. In fairness, it was a mix of lack of foresight and sheer stupidity that made them come to this conclusion. Rivers loses his cool with James once they get back to camp, which he now admits was a bad idea with hindsight. James threatens to kill Rivers and the Raja himself, in a moment of apparent insanity, but thankfully the two veteran hunters are able to overpower him. But that’s not where the story ends. Oh no, it would be too easy if Rivers simply brought back James to the present day and had him arrested. The actual ending is much bleaker, and truth be told I don’t recall if the X Minus One episode adapts this part of the story. Needless to say that de Camp takes the grimness of how “A Sound of Thunder” ended and kicks it up a notch, using a time paradox rather than the butterfly effect. It’s this bleaknesss, bordering on nihilism, that Brian Aldiss seemingly took and ran with when he wrote his own take on the “time travel dinosaur-hunting” story with “Poor Little Warrior!” a couple years after “A Gun for Dinosaur” was published.

A Step Farther Out

For decades “A Gun for Dinosaur” was a one-off story, although de Camp would eventually return to Reginald Rivers and his adventures in the early ’90s, possibly influenced by the immense success of Jurassic Park (the book), or maybe it was just serendipity. Despite having several sequels, albeit from a much older de Camp, I suspect there’s a reason why “A Gun for Dinosaur” is the only entry old-timey SF fans talk about. This was a surprisingly vicious, if a little too documentary-like, story about a couple men who got in way over their heads. The attention to detail, given what we knew about dinosaurs in the 1950s (which was not much, mind you), is admirable, and despite being a novelette I didn’t really feel its length. De Camp was at this point considered one of the “old guard,” but he had quite a bit of energy left to both humor the reader and make them think. It seems that when he wrote this story he wanted to write a better time-travel story than “A Sound of Thunder,” and—hot take—I think he did.

See you next time.