Despite containing a paleontologist orgy, plenty of dinosaur action scenes, evolved avian future inheritors of the earth, and a multitude of time travel paradoxes, I couldn't quite finish Michael Swanwick's sci-fi dinosaur time travel novel Bones of the Earth-- the story is Primer meets Jurassic Park, and is mainly concerned with the dissemination of scientific papers and information through the time continuum-- people come from the future and give hints (often to themselves) as to what research will be fruitful but everyone tries to avoid outright changes in causality-- or else The Unchanging, the future creatures who gave humans the gift of time travel, wil take it away; the book did make me think quite a bit; for example here's a paradox not exactly investigated in the book, but alluded to: say you have ten gold bars, and you take one-- so now there's nine in the box-- and you go back one hour in a time machine and then put that one gold bar into the box containing ten gold bars . . . so now there are eleven gold bars, so now the box that you take the gold bar from has eleven gold bars, not ten-- where did that extra bar come from? did you break the law of conservation if mass? could you keep doing this to infinity and flood the world with gold? causing massive inflation or something . . . apparently someone named Novikov thought about this, and came up with the Novikov self-consistency principle . . . anyway, I can't quite recommend this novel-- it's dry at times, despite the sex and dinosaurs, and often, the characters make long-winded expository speeches about various scientific theories and ideas-- Swanwick developed this from a short story, and it shows: six theropods out of ten.
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