The Virgin and the Dinosaur

Rating:
Summary: Rating: "A": hi-tech time-travel tale; funny and sexy.
Review: Jake is an ace field agent for FTL. He's just pioneered a new portal to the uppermost Maastrichian at Hell Creek, Montana. Peg is a star paleontologist, here to study dinosaurs on humanity's first visit to the Mesozoic. Jake's got the hots for Peg, but she's a pack mother for the Teen Lesbians and besides, she's here for *sauropods*.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent! A fresh and engaging ride through time.
Review: Rough and ready time commando Jake Bento and lovely paleontologist Peg barely make it back from a Mesozoic mission, and thats just a warmup for greater challenges. This is the first Rodrigo Garcia R. that I've read. The guy is good. Great characters. It would never have occured to me to mix dinosaurs, Mark Twain river boat mayhem and hip hypermodern sci fi. But it works! Buy this book.

Rating:
Summary: Funny, sexy, hi-tech time-travel novel. 4.5 stars
Review: __________________________________________
Jake is an ace field agent for FTL. He's just pioneered a new portal to
the uppermost Maastrichian at Hell Creek, Montana. Peg is a star
paleontologist, here to study dinosaurs on humanity's first visit to the
Mesozoic. Jake's got the hots for Peg, but she's a pack mother for the
Teen Lesbians and besides, she's here for *sauropods*.

The big ones are in proto-South America, and after a close encounter
with a tyrannosaur Jake is easily persuaded to go hunting for
herbivores. Unfortunately, there's a hurricane in the path of their
fusion-powered blimp, and their voyage ends in the Cretaceous
treetops. Peg is feeling amorous after the crash:

..."so this is what the adult male organ feels like. I haven't held a penis
since playing sex therapist in kindergarten. But that one was not so big
and active... oh look, an erection... This is fun..."

Fun aside, Jake and Peg are faced with a hike from Texas to Montana, a
trip up the wormhole to early nineteenth-century America, a visit with
Sitting Bull and the Hunkpapa Sioux, and a long trip down the
Mississippi to reach the next portal back to the 24th century and home,
with dirty dealings with riverboat gamblers and slavers en route.

It's good clean fun, and Peg and Jake return home in triumph, though
FTL is miffed at Jake losing their reactor and blimp... and there's
something fishy going on behind the scenes at the company. A quick
trip to the La Brea tar pits in California's Pleistocene ends in disaster,
and Jake is demoted for the return trip to the Cretaceous, this time to
round up some dinos for FTL's game park...

This is a fine combination of a well-drawn future society with
good paleontology brought to life, and a cool historical
adventure to boot. I liked it a lot. Highly recommended.

review copyright 1998 by Peter D. Tillman