The Earth survive for four billion or so years before humans showed up and started record history . Why limit ourselves to the what - ifs of the past few thousands years ? In these alternate reality story , continent and dinosaur empire rise and fall .
65 million year ago , some tragedy – probably do by an asteroid – wiped out the dinosaurs . History then gave way to our mammal ancestors and , eventually , us . But what if the asteroid never showed up ? Well , then you get thinking dinosaur civilizations as in Harry Harrison ’s West of Eden . The Yilané , as Harrison names the dinosaur ( okay , technically lounge lizard ) race , are masters of genetic engineering and have created everything from guns to torpedo by modifying other species . The main conflict in West of Eden and its two sequels comes from the Yilané ’s discovery of a humanoid race , the Tanu , in North America .
A conflict between intelligent dinosaur and mammalian mintage is also the national of Taylor Anderson ’s Destroyermen serial where a WWII battleship is sent to an alternate world where a airstream evolved from raptor is at state of war with a species of lemur - men . But sometimes dinosaur civilisation make their own problems . In John E. Stith ’s One Giant ill-use an thinking dinosaur race invents time travel and goes back sixty five million years where they accidentally cause their own extinction . This causes the rise of an thinking worm society that invents time travel and … you get the idea .
Even when we cope to get free of the dinosaur we still have all the other hominid to vex about , or peradventure they have to worry about us . In Harry Turtledove ’s A Different Flesh stories , Homo Erectus has survived in North America – when the humans come on the continent , the aborigine are viewed as sub - human freak and enslaved . In Robert J. Sawyer ’s Neanderthal Parallax series a neanderthal physicist from an substitute universe ends up crossing over to our reality . This terminate up die about as well for both civilizations as you might expect .
Neanderthals are also major characters in Harry Turtledove ’s Down in the Bottomlands but the impart equipment here is a huge geographical change to the surface of the earth . In the timeline of Bottomlands , the Mediterranean ocean is a dry Mediterranean basin forming Europe and Africa into a single supercontinent and creating a timeline where Humans and Neanderthals survive to the present day . Turtledove explore a similar premise in his Atlantis series in which a vast chunk of North America broke off millions of age ago and create an 8th continent .
And as long as we ’re move way right smart back , we ’d might as well go back a few billion years cover some what - ifs from the very beginning . Neil F. Comin ’s What if the Moon Did n’t Exist : Voyages to Earths that Might Have Been is a series of essay that search not just a moonless world but earths with less deal or larger Sun or a half twelve other strange formulations of our planet .
BooksdinosaursRobert J. Sawyer
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