Rating: 
Summary: For fans of Jurassic Park
Review: Con Greighton's father John is one of the wealthiest men in the year 2059, but to his daughter he's just an absentee father more interested in business and women than he is in her. When John invites Con on a mysterious journey with his fiancée and the trip's sponsor, the enigmatic Mr. Green, she accepts because it's a chance to do something never done before, journey back in time to the Upper Cretaceous period when the dinosaurs roamed the earth.When they arrive in prehistoric Montana Isle, paleontology student Rick Clements is elated to see in real life what he has only seen in fossils. Rick's job is to keep Con occupied while her father and Mr. Green discuss business, but when Rick realizes that they are on ground zero of the K-T meteor strike, a dream vacation turns into a nightmare. Fans of Jurassic Park are going to love CRETACEOUS SEA as they glimpse into an era that has inspired many novels and movies. There are many surprises in this work so readers will never become bored or put the book down until they have all their questions answered. Will Hubbell has written a science fiction novel that will appeal to the action-adventure crowd. Harriet Klausner
Rating:
Summary: A great read.
Review: Ever eaten hypsilophodontid? Go upwhen with Con and Rick to the K-T boundary on a trip that takes a double handful of characters, dinosaurs, survival, and technology and pours them into a plot of adventure and fantasy that never stops giving. A great book for anyone anywhere anytime. Highly enjoyable; worth the bucks!
Rating:
Summary: A great read.
Review: Far from the worst thing I've ever read, but equally far from the best, Hubbell's novel gives the reader a pleasant couple of hours of escapism. If it does not rise much above the mass of similar genre titles, it does leave the reader with a pleasant sense of adventure and happy ending. Worth a look, but science fiction lovers will find a far better effort in Michael Swanwick's "Bones of the Earth," in which the same general situation--time travel involving dinosausr--is treated far more imaginatively
Rating: 
Summary: Predictable time travel melodrama
Review: Far from the worst thing I've ever read, but equally far from the best, Hubbell's novel gives the reader a pleasant couple of hours of escapism. If it does not rise much above the mass of similar genre titles, it does leave the reader with a pleasant sense of adventure and happy ending. Worth a look, but science fiction lovers will find a far better effort in Michael Swanwick's "Bones of the Earth," in which the same general situation--time travel involving dinosausr--is treated far more imaginatively
Rating:
Summary: A thoroughly enjoyable read
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this book. A survival story set during the meteor impact that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, this book kept me turning the pages, even though I didn't want to be finished with it. One of the best books I've read in a long time.
Rating:
Summary: A thoroughly enjoyable read
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this book. A survival story set during the meteor impact that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, this book kept me turning the pages, even though I didn't want to be finished with it. One of the best books I've read in a long time.
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Summary: Montana Isle gives the term "tourist trap" new meaning
Review: It's pretty much standard practice - if you travel in time, you pretty much have to pay a visit to the dinosaurs. In the case of Will Hubbell's Cretaceous Sea, the cast of characters has no other choice because the only time coordinates available to them transport them back to the late Cretaceous era. This isn't standard time travel science fiction, though; in the hands of the author, time travel is more a means to an end than anything else. The actual journey back in time is surprisingly bland here; you would expect man's first temporal journey to be full of technical jargon and references to all kinds of whatsits and to take on some kind of kaleidoscopic majesty in the telling. Here, the journey is nothing short of boring. Time travel itself isn't the real focus of the novel, of course, so it is not really a weakness. The story really only begins when our party of eight arrive some 65 million years in the past.
Peter Green is the mysterious man behind the secret time machine, and he is intent on getting the financial support of a Mr. Moneybags by the name of John Greighton. Greighton agrees to come along for the temporal ride, seeing the trip to "Montana Isle" as a vacation to the most exotic resort ever conceived - one which just so happens to exist 65 million years in the past. He brings along his latest silly, young fiancé as well as his somewhat estranged daughter Constance. Green isn't too happy when he learns Constance is coming, so he has an underling hire paleontology graduate student Rick Clements to join the team and, in so doing, keep Constance out of his hair. Clements is skeptical of the time travel claim, but he can't pass up an opportunity to study live dinosaurs. Rick, unhappy with the unexpected duties he finds himself providing for the "guests," soon begins to figure out that there is something not right about this whole thing - the artificial caves for the rich "tourists" do not seem to have been constructed by human hand, for instance, and Green's assistant Joe definitely seems to be keeping some important secrets. After a rocky start, he and Con develop a connection, and she leads him to still more mysterious secrets, in the form of unknown technology, hidden inside the caves. One such object of seemingly alien design is a set of strange, constantly changing symbols. Eventually, Rick figures out that it is a clock counting down to nothing less than the K-T event. The "resort" is actually an observatory located in extremely close proximity (geographically as well as temporally) to the spot where the giant meteor that killed the dinosaurs crashed to earth - staying on the island means imminent death.
The second half of the novel becomes a story of survival in the hardest of ecological times. In the wake of the meteor crash, Earth's skies are preternaturally darkened for months, the temperature drops to frigid levels, vegetation is devastated by the environmental impact of the meteorite, and wildlife dwindles down to next to nothing. Small mammals may have survived the end of the Cretaceous Era, but that doesn't mean a twenty-first century man and woman with few supplies can, especially when a few dangerous dinosaur breeds are wandering around with increasingly empty stomachs. Living in such a devastated world, cut off from everyone and everything you have known (by 65 million years, no less) is tough, but it is here that Will Hubbell's main characters finally begin to shine.
As the secrets of Green's time machine are gradually revealed, more and more questions are raised as to the actual origin of the device, the people who built it and their goals, the prospect for Rick and Con ever returning to their own time, and others. The paradox of traveling back and forth in time only adds additional ambiguity to the mix. Hubbell is able to engineer a small series of plot shifts as the plot advances toward its conclusion, making up for a few weak spots in the story and ensuring that Cretaceous Sea comes across as an entertaining, thought-provoking novel.
The reader knows from the start that Peter Green is up to no good, and his ambitions turn out to be of a very stereotypical variety. Actually, all of the secondary characters in the novel are rather weak and shallow, especially John Greighton and his annoying fiancé. Only one supporting character possesses enough depth to ever become interesting. Rick and Con, for their part, are much more agreeable characters - Cretaceous Sea is really their story, and the novel really doesn't begin clicking on all cylinders until the focus is squarely placed on their fight for survival. Several aspects of the novel could have benefited from more time and attention, but Hubbell does manage to produce a fairly unpredictable ending that works quite well indeed. There's not enough to Cretaceous Sea to make it a truly impressive science fiction novel, but it is certainly an above-average, wonderfully entertaining piece of writing.
Rating:
Summary: A classic adventure in every sense
Review: Most time travel novels seem to get bogged down in either cause and effect trivialities, or long winded explanations of how the time travel works. Mr. Hubbell does neither. He gets into a little (very little) about paradoxes and also about how the time machine works, but just enough to set the stage. I must say that all the way through the book I thought I had the ending pegged. I didn't mind, as this is one of those books you keep reading even though you know the ending. Good characters, good plot settings and fine action. Then you get to the end. All I will say is, you're not going to believe it. Either that or you are more cognizant of what was going on. Regardless, it took me by surprise, and I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Go ahead, spend your money on this one, you won't be sorry.
Rating:
Summary: I never saw that ending coming
Review: Most time travel novels seem to get bogged down in either cause and effect trivialities, or long winded explanations of how the time travel works. Mr. Hubbell does neither. He gets into a little (very little) about paradoxes and also about how the time machine works, but just enough to set the stage. I must say that all the way through the book I thought I had the ending pegged. I didn't mind, as this is one of those books you keep reading even though you know the ending. Good characters, good plot settings and fine action. Then you get to the end. All I will say is, you're not going to believe it. Either that or you are more cognizant of what was going on. Regardless, it took me by surprise, and I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Go ahead, spend your money on this one, you won't be sorry.
Rating:
Summary: A classic adventure in every sense
Review: The author integrates so many ideas and elements into this book in such a seamless and contiguous way that I found myself marveling at his skill throughout the book. The term "suspension of disbelief" comes to mind. Bravo! Let's see another book - and soon!
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