Vacation coming up and got the urge for a good historical novel of prehistory. Here are past likes and dislikes in this genre.
Clan of the Cave Bear. Liked this much. Read the 2nd in the series and stopped with the 3rd about half the way through it. Just too much current trends in historical context for me. Can’t believe it, at least for me. I just want to read a good story.
Reindeer Moon and **The Animal Wife **by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. Liked them both very much.
I have no interest in prehistoric fantasy stuff like the Conan the Barbarian series, etc.
So any suggestions for a good summer read ?
I really liked Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson, set around 32,000 years ago at the time some famous cave paintings in France were created. Werner Herzog’s documentary film Cave of Forgotten Dreams is about the same paintings.
I said some stuff about the book here, but it contains mild spoilers…
And there’s also The Gathering Storm by Margaret Elphinstone set in Scotland just over 8,000 years ago after the east coast has been devastated by a tsunami (which actually happened). My comments here.
There’s Evolution by Stephen Baxter. Well, it’s prehistory and posthistory, if you will. It starts off following a small mammal thing. It then follows the lineage until it becomes people, then follows people once they stop being people.
Yes, The Pagans trilogy by Richard Herley. It’s comprised of three books: The Stone Arrow, The Flint Lord, and The Earth Goddess. It’s set in Neolithic Britain, against the backdrop of hunter-gatherer peoples struggling against the spread of agriculture, and while the story itself and a few of the cultural particulars are obviously inventions of the author, he’s the kind of writer who does extensive research, and everything is plausible and deeply thought-out.
It has quite a bit of action and derring-do; the first two books in particular are like Stone Age Rambo in their levels of action and violence. Cool stuff.