I finished “reading” Douglas Preston’s Extinction on audiodisc. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Childs (together or separately) are, like Clive Cussler’s collaborators, my guilty pleasure in thriller reading. They’re all better than Dan Brown, but it’s bubble-gum comic book stuff. That’s not to say it’s badly written, or not researched or thought out. But there’s an undefinable something about it that screams out “blockbuster movie material” (although precious few of Preston, Childs, or Cussler’s stuff has been turned into movies)
Extinction superficially resembles Jurassic Park, as the book itself admits, only with Pleistocene animals rather than Mesozoic ones. Instead of using DNA recovered from mosquitos preserved in amber, they use surviving strands of fossil DNA, selective breeding, and gene manipulation with CRISPR to re-create mammoths, Irish Elk, what used to be called Baluchitheriums, Megatheria, and other such creatures. They’re kept sterile (no BS about “frog DNA”) and only relatively harmless herbivores are “de-extincted” (no Saber-toothed tigers, cave bears, or dire wolves). So everything should be fine, right? Well, no. If that were the case there’d be no book. Og course there’s a prehistoric fly in the ointment.
And now I’ve got to spoiler the rest. Sorry.
They de-extincted Neanderthals. You’d think the moral implications would be serious enough, plus the fact that Neanderthals aren’t harmless herbivores. Plus they let them breed. Th resurrected cavemen turn out to be far smarter than people think, and awfully hostile. Oopsy!
I could buy that, as a premise, but Preston does several things that annoy me. One is that he usually treats these Neanderthals as if they weren’t “de-extincted”, but plucked as if by time machine from the prehistoric world. So they know how to organize and hunt and stalk in groups. They know how to make primitive camouflage. They know how to make spears and other weapons and and damnably proficient with them (they hit three people – two of them wearing body armor – lethally and from long distances in the dark. They know how prehistoric neanderthals cooked and ate food and were cannibals.
Yet at other times he shows them as if they were modern humans, dressing in L.L. Bean clothes and playing chess and playing the violin and using the internet.
I’m sorry, but I can’t buy it. Making knives and spears from raw materials is a highly developed skill. Throwing them (with atlatls? He doesn’t say) with lethal accuracy under difficult conditions requires monumental amounts of practice. Researching exactly how your predecessors did their hunting and stalking requires huge amounts of study. His neanderthals don’t ring true.
Ad to this a huge case of “stacked the deck in their favor”. His neanderthals know how to operate drones, to disable GPS trackers, how to steal and wire up dynamite and detonators, how to shiut down redundant safety systems, and just happen to be in the right plce at the right time. You can’t explain it all on Homo Sapiens underestimating them, or on their greater strength or tracking ability (tracking is another of those things you have to learn by long experience or study).
The change of heart of the neanders at the end comes way too abruptly, and their success far too complete and easy. But it’s clear he wants to write a sequel.
