An effective blend of dinosaurs (and all that that entails) with social commentary
Thailand is apparently a great place to dig up maniraptor fossils. Maniraptors, in case you are not as up on your Cretaceous zoology, were a carnivorous dinosaur in the same clade that gave rise to modern birds. This is well accepted among modern-day paleontology, to the point that the Wikipedia page features photographs of geese and albatrosses alongside dinosaur skeletons. What is less generally accepted among modern day paleontologists is that maniraptors were sentient, with a scent-based communication system which operated by means of the synthesis of complex organic molecules that encoded thoughts, commands, social status, and even mathematics. Indeed, so advanced was this maniraptor civilization that it could create telescopes and calculate trajectories of stellar objects.
In other words, they knew that the asteroid was coming.
66 million years later, a team of American paleontologists working in collaboration with a local team of Thai scientists are on a promising dig in Thailand, and discover that bones are not the only things preserved in the stone. A strange, crystallized green chemical can also be found, which quickly condenses into liquid upon contact with air, and then evaporates into fumes. And when you breathe in the fumes… weird things happen.
The dig is further complicated when a Chinese-backed coup removes the Thai government. The new government nullifies the scientific contract with the Americans, on the grounds that they are CIA-funded spies rather than legitimate paleontologists. Worse, this accusation may not be entirely wrong: the CIA did help fund the expedition, after all. And then weirdly powerful organized crime syndicates start muscling in on the fossils, as if they knew something about them that the research team don’t.
Interspersed with these present-day events are scenes from 66 million years ago. A male technician, dreadfully subordinate to females in maniraptor society, discovers an anomaly in the sky, and calculates, with increasing terror, the probability of it hitting Earth. He struggles to convince the females that the danger is real, hampered by the habitual disdain with which females regard males in their society, and hampered further by the biological subordination they impose on him by virtue of their pheremones. If they don’t like what he’s saying, they can exude the right chemicals to silence him forcibly, rendering him unable to do anything but obey their will.
It feels like it should be goofy. I mean, it is goofy. We’ve got talking dinosaurs and magic fossil juice and spies and crime bosses and helicopter commando raids and a deposed princess alongside valiant scientists in white coats making discoveries in the lab. This is a fun book.
But also, it’s a book with a certain amount of heart to it. Yes, it’s telling us a slightly silly story about dinosaurs. But at the same time, it’s aware that there are political statements to be made, and it does a very good job at raising some quite thorny questions about the ethics of pretty much every plot point.
Consider the sequence at the beginning, when the research team is deported from Thailand after a coup. One of their colleagues, Kit, is a Thai paleontologist, who is excited about the work and eager for the project to be successful. But also he resents the fact—and rightfully so, I think—that this project would be impossible without the Americans paying for it. He dreams of a country that can afford to excavate its own fossils, led by its own scientists, without relying on international funding and losing the results to international universities. But the Americans do not feel the same. When the new regime forces the Americans out, without permitting them to take the excavated fossils with them, the team leader, Samira, is furious. I signed a contract, she keeps insisting. I have a right to take those fossils with me!
First of all, it’s cute that Samira thinks a new government will honour the agreements of the previous one that it deposed in a coup. But even leaving aside the political forces at play, her sense of entitlement to another country’s priceless scientific discoveries is not entirely comfortable. And that discomfort sits even more uneasily with her own personal history. She was adopted as an orphan in Nigeria by a married couple running a charity clinic. Her whole life since then has been shaped by her parents’ desires to Do Good In The Developing World, to the point that she sometimes feels less like their daughter and more like a tangible trophy of the Good that they have Done. This friction is exacerbated by their religious beliefs: they are young-earth creationists, which doesn’t mix well with her work in paleontology. And yet their love for her is real, and the career which she values so highly would have been utterly impossible if they had not adopted her and taken her to America—just as the paleontological research in Thailand would be impossible without American funding. It’s quite an elegant commentary on unequal power relations, which can appear in parallel ways in contexts both personal and international.
The other elements of the plot don’t shy away from engaging with the ethical complexities either. Gender inequality has a role in both maniraptor society and modern-day Thailand. With the maniraptors, it is entirely biologically coded. No dinosaur gender rights movement can change the fact that females produce pheromones that utterly dominate the will of the males. Still, the challenges that male dinosaurs face in society are a pretty straightforward mirror of the challenges that women face in the present day, especially when organized crime makes a good chunk of its cash through kidnapping and selling women into sexual slavery.
But what is a good solution to these injustices? The maniraptors are very skilled genetic engineers. The apparently insurmountable biological basis of their gender inequalities may not be so insurmountable to them as they appear to us. Unfortunately, the asteroid put an end to them before they could undergo their own equal rights revolution. The humans, by contrast, do get a chance to challenge the gendered misdeeds of the crime bosses. But when they do, the brutality of the retribution for the sexual violence gave me pause. In a simpler book, I would have been left with an uncomfortable sense that I was supposed to be cheering on the slaughter. But Walton does a good job balancing the inherent goofiness of his premise (magic dinosaur fossil juice!) with some genuine thoughtfulness about the complications inherent in combating and undoing unequal power structures.
I should acknowledge here that we have a white American author writing a book set largely in Thailand, with a lot of the plot focusing on Thai people’s thoughts and feelings about government, culture, crime, and the challenges of living in an internationally weak country beset by more powerful nations looking to exploit it. Viewpoint characters include Thai people and women of colour. There’s a lot of potential for missteps here, and I don’t myself have the lived experience or specialist expertise to assert confidently that Walton avoids them. I will, however, say that from my perspective as a reasonably attentive reader, the characters felt real; the details about Thai culture and politics felt as if they had research behind them; and the discussion of power imbalances seemed respectful and nuanced. It did not feel like a book designed to exoticize the Other; and to the extent that the nuances of Thai politics and culture were oversimplified, the exact same thing happens with the CIA and US politics and American universities.
The result is a ripping good yarn that absolutely delivers on the premise in the cover illustration. I had fun. How could I not? Dinosaurs!!
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10. An enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws.
Highlights:
- Dinosaurs!
- Paleontologists digging up stuff better left buried
- Scent-based communication
- Thailand
Reference: Walton, David. Living Memory [Archaeopteryx Books, 2022].
CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social
