Prehistorical Fiction

Anyone have any recommendations? I’ve read Stonehenge by Bernard Cornwall, which was excellent, I thought. I’ve also read Clan of the Cave Bear, which was great, and a couple of its sequels, which were not so great. The Inheritors by William Golding was interesting, too.

Anyone have any others?

While looking for a book that took place in Stone Age times someone pointed me to an index of prehistoric fiction. It had over 1100 books listed. I’m at work now and saw this thread just before it’s time to go off break, but when I get home later this afternoon I’ll dig up the web address.

Whoops! Just found it here. Try

http://www.trussel.com/prehist/titles.htm

I thought Sarum was pretty good.

Yow, that’s a huge list, Baker. Thanks. I think!

You can search the list by title, author, or whatever. I was looking for a book I read when I was a kid, that involved kids from today finding a lost world of dinosaurs and cavemen coexisting. I started slogging through the author list, clicking on books written in the time period I’d read the book. Luckily the author’s name, Glen Frewer, was close to the top of the alphabet. The book was Adventure in Forgotten Valley. My sister found the book Firehunter in the K’s.

Seems like there are a lot of French titles. Forgot the name of the author, but the book The Ice People was French, and I read it in translation. It took place in the near future, and concerned a discovery of advanced technology buried under the ice at the South Pole. That was a pretty good book actually. I haven’t looked to see if it is on the list.

I like how you can get a brief description of the story in that index.

Judith Tarr does some prehistory, although most of what she does is historical fiction (Cleopatra through Richard the Lionheart). She’s on the list.

Oh - Michael Gear and his wife are good, too, except for the fact that the books are pretty formulaic. Good guy / good girl must fight bad guy despite overwhelming odds for the good of the people!! Anthropologically, they’re fabulously fascinating.

Please search for J. H. Rosny-Aîné’s The Xipehuz, a prehistoric science-fiction tale about a group of alien “shapes” spotted by nomads and all the efforts to stop them from causing the human extinction. It’s a novelette, but highly recommendable.

And Grousser, don’t forget he’s also the author of Quest for fire (La guerre du feu. in French).

No, I didn’t forget it. What happens is I didn’t know it.

It seems that he was Joseph-Henri Boex, half part of a pseudonim: J. -H Rosny Aîné and his younger brother Seraphin Justin, who used J. -H Rosny Jeune.

I’m going to check who exactly the credited author is.

Julian May does prehistoric science fiction. I don’t know if you’re going for realism or not, though. The Pliocene Saga is pretty good, but I’ve never read the other one, Milieu.

“I thought Sarum was pretty good”

what do you think about the last three chapters? I think most of the book was excellent, but the ending was a little boring. It seems that the author got tired of writing and tried to finish the book as fast as he could.

I agree, One Vision. Sarum had some standout chapters (the one about the stonemason working on Salisbury Cathedral in particular), but the ending just totally fizzled. Only the first three chapters were prehistoric, by the way. For the rest, you get a lot of Roman, Anglo-Saxon, medieval, English Civil War, and so on.

An outstanding prehistoric novel is Dance of the Tiger by Finland’s renowned paleontologist Björn Kurtén. It’s a novelization of his ingenious theory of how the Neanderthals became extinct; he gives the clues to the mystery and you, the reader, can figure it out for yourself before he reveals the answer in the epilogue. Try it; it’s a good read.

So nobody’s going to advocate the Earth’s Children series? Here’s my take on it: The first book, Clan of the Cave Bear, was the best. The second one was the second best, and so on down the line. Jean Auel’s writing talent deteriorated more with each new book. It took me two attempts to get through the 4th book, The Plains of Passage. Then after a 10-year wait, the 5th book, The Shelters of Stone, massively hyped and hugely bloated, was a dismal load of crap. I quit before I got halfway through and swore off Auel forevermore. Hang it up, Jean, already.

OK, the very best prehistoric novel I ever read was definitely Pillar of the Sky by Cecelia Holland, about the building of Stonehenge and the social/political transformations in primitive society that went along with it. This book rocked. Check it out.

I don’t mind science fiction, but for the purposes of this thread I would prefer realism. Which isn’t to say I won’t return to any such suggestions later. I’ve already put Harry Harrison’s West of Eden on my future reading list.

It’s been translated into English, I presume?

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I think I got up to the third one and quit halfway through when I realized it was turning into All My Cavemen.

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This sounds promising. I’ve read some of her stuff and enjoyed it. Thanks! I’m also going to tackle Sarum. Historical fiction is my favorite genre, and I don’t think I’ll mind a little time-period mixing and matching.

I’ve just read Norman Spinrad’s short story The Age of Invention. It made me laugh, so it’s most fiction rather than science fiction. But very funny.