The Pirates Don’t Eat The Tourists: Jurassic Park & Prehistoric Fiction
Jul 1, 2026 · 56 min · 15 segments
Send me a voice message! Dinosaurs are real, which is exactly why they are so hard to write. Humans never lived alongside them, so any prehistoric…
Adam RobertsGuestRoland SquireHostLooking at those names on there, what would you take away from the range of authors on that list?
There's a lot you could say about the trajectory of prehistory and the way it filters through down into culture.
The reason we're starting in the 19th century is because this is the great age of fossil discovery.
But then through the 20th century and up to the 21st century, there's a fundamental problem, which is that from quite early on, people came to understand that dinosaurs and human beings had never coexisted on the planet.
So if you want to tell a story that is more than just paleontology you have to put characters in there and that means you need twist you need dinosaurs to be resurrected as in jurassic park or you need people to go back in time as in the very bradbury story we need to find some other way of putting those two things together And I think what interests me about it is the way what is a much older trope, if I can call it that, of dragons and monsters that goes back into the history of fantasy and medieval romance and so on, gets... kind of superseded, I was going to say, but actually dragons are still very popular, aren't they? But there's something similar going on with the fascination that science fiction writers have with dinosaurs, except that it's grounded in reality.
No, they're real, not in inverted commas, dragons in inverted commas, but they were actually real.
And Verne styles that as going further and further back in time until they stumble out into this large subterranean hollow earth world, which is still inhabited by dinosaurs.
And there's something of that, that Edgar Rice Burroughs was interested in the idea that the Earth was hollow, and that if you went inside the Earth, it would be a kind of primitive version of the Earth.
A sense in which dinosaurs are there to represent the deep, ancient history of the planet.
But then I think what you get later on, and I'm interested as to why it would be that in the 80s and the 90s, there was a sudden resurgence of interest in dinosaur stories.
thinking of things like Harry Harrison's West of Eden, which is an alternate evolution narrative where the dinosaurs haven't died out and have evolved into intelligent, civilized within reason creatures, but also Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park novel, which is 1990.
And there have been multiple sequels to Jurassic Park at the end of that century, which are more, I think, about science and about the possibilities of science and resurrecting these creatures so that you can tell monster stories.
And I'm not sure what was going on in the 90s that meant that dinosaurs came back in such a big way.
Looking at those names on there, what would you take away from the range of authors on that list?
There's a lot you could say about the trajectory of prehistory and the way it filters through down into culture.
The reason we're starting in the 19th century is because this is the great age of fossil discovery.
But then through the 20th century and up to the 21st century, there's a fundamental problem, which is that from quite early on, people came to understand that dinosaurs and human beings had never coexisted on the planet.
So if you want to tell a story that is more than just paleontology you have to put characters in there and that means you need twist you need dinosaurs to be resurrected as in jurassic park or you need people to go back in time as in the very bradbury story we need to find some other way of putting those two things together And I think what interests me about it is the way what is a much older trope, if I can call it that, of dragons and monsters that goes back into the history of fantasy and medieval romance and so on, gets... kind of superseded, I was going to say, but actually dragons are still very popular, aren't they? But there's something similar going on with the fascination that science fiction writers have with dinosaurs, except that it's grounded in reality.
No, they're real, not in inverted commas, dragons in inverted commas, but they were actually real.
And Verne styles that as going further and further back in time until they stumble out into this large subterranean hollow earth world, which is still inhabited by dinosaurs.
And there's something of that, that Edgar Rice Burroughs was interested in the idea that the Earth was hollow, and that if you went inside the Earth, it would be a kind of primitive version of the Earth.
A sense in which dinosaurs are there to represent the deep, ancient history of the planet.
But then I think what you get later on, and I'm interested as to why it would be that in the 80s and the 90s, there was a sudden resurgence of interest in dinosaur stories.
thinking of things like Harry Harrison's West of Eden, which is an alternate evolution narrative where the dinosaurs haven't died out and have evolved into intelligent, civilized within reason creatures, but also Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park novel, which is 1990.
And there have been multiple sequels to Jurassic Park at the end of that century, which are more, I think, about science and about the possibilities of science and resurrecting these creatures so that you can tell monster stories.
And I'm not sure what was going on in the 90s that meant that dinosaurs came back in such a big way.
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