Basic Idea
I want dinosaurs eating people.
How we get to the point that they eat people, however, is no easy task. There's cloning (Jurassic Park); there's avoiding the extinction catastrophe (Dinotopia); there are alternate worlds (Dinosaur Planet by Anne McCaffery and Dinosaur Lords by Victor Milan); there's accidental time-travel (Footprints of Thunder by James David and the Dino Crisis video games).
It got to the point that I decided that I needed to get dinosaurs eating people and focus on what would be cool about that. However, I'm too pragmatic to just have a planet where dinosaurs and humans coexist (though that one is still a possibility, maybe for a comic). I wanted a little bit clearer cause/effect explanation for why the two are together.
With help from my gorgeous wife, I hammered out a basic concept of time-travel that is based upon the Alderaan principle: Millions of lives crying out just as they are silenced. Earth has gone through five (and we're likely in the midst of the sixth) biotic crises, or mass extinctions. Fortunately for me, three of these extinctions pertain to dinosaurs.
By using the massive amount of death associated with each extinction, time becomes thin enough that time-travel is possible, though only to those extinction events. Dinosaur hunters (I have to come up with a better name) go into these times of danger to harvest biospheres, including dinosaurs. Who better to help them in these dangerous areas than dinosaurs themselves?
As a result, the dinosaurs will be given enhanced technology to allow them to communicate with people (not talk, though), form friendships, and behave in non-saurian ways. I also plan on having herbivores be almost as dangerous as the carnivores, since that's how real life is.
And a lot of people getting killed by dinosaurs.
How we get to the point that they eat people, however, is no easy task. There's cloning (Jurassic Park); there's avoiding the extinction catastrophe (Dinotopia); there are alternate worlds (Dinosaur Planet by Anne McCaffery and Dinosaur Lords by Victor Milan); there's accidental time-travel (Footprints of Thunder by James David and the Dino Crisis video games).
It got to the point that I decided that I needed to get dinosaurs eating people and focus on what would be cool about that. However, I'm too pragmatic to just have a planet where dinosaurs and humans coexist (though that one is still a possibility, maybe for a comic). I wanted a little bit clearer cause/effect explanation for why the two are together.
With help from my gorgeous wife, I hammered out a basic concept of time-travel that is based upon the Alderaan principle: Millions of lives crying out just as they are silenced. Earth has gone through five (and we're likely in the midst of the sixth) biotic crises, or mass extinctions. Fortunately for me, three of these extinctions pertain to dinosaurs.
By using the massive amount of death associated with each extinction, time becomes thin enough that time-travel is possible, though only to those extinction events. Dinosaur hunters (I have to come up with a better name) go into these times of danger to harvest biospheres, including dinosaurs. Who better to help them in these dangerous areas than dinosaurs themselves?
As a result, the dinosaurs will be given enhanced technology to allow them to communicate with people (not talk, though), form friendships, and behave in non-saurian ways. I also plan on having herbivores be almost as dangerous as the carnivores, since that's how real life is.
And a lot of people getting killed by dinosaurs.
Status
Major planning and research is necessary for this. I've been putting in hours at nearby museums, reading different books, and following paleontologists on Twitter to keep me in the dinosaur mood. I even bought myself a nice Camarasaurus toy because they're cool.
Because of other projects, this one is (possibly) next in line, but I doubt I'll get more than research done before 2016. |