Cover blurb
How to Train Your Dragon meets Mad Max in this story of an orphan in a fractured Southwest who just wants to ride a dinosaur under the lights.
Come one, come all to the dinosaur rodeo!
Tif Tamim wants nothing more than to be a dinosaur buckaroo. An orphan in search of a place to rest his head and a job to weigh down his pockets, Tif has bounced from circus to circus, yearning for a chance to ride a prehistoric beauty under the sparkling lights of a big top.
To become a buckaroo, Tif needs to learn the tools of the trade, yet few dino maestros want to take a scrawny nobody from nowhere under their wing. But when Tif frees a dino from an abusive owner and braves the roving gangs of the formerly American West to bring the dino to safety, he catches someone’s eye. And boy, how those eyes dazzle Tif from the back of a bucking carnotaur.
My thoughts
“Don’t judge a book by its cover” is an adage worth keeping in mind when approaching Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur. The cover art and publisher’s description – “How to Train Your Dragon meets Mad Max” – may lead one to think this is a lighthearted adventure about a boy training to ride dinosaurs. The novella is actually much closer in tone to the first Mad Max film, set in a future U.S. where far-right militias have torn the country apart and established little kingdoms that regularly fight over land and resources. The story deals with animal abuse, sex slavery, and other grim subjects, and the publisher’s How to Train Your Dragon comparison does it a disservice. That’s a shame because I think if readers put their initial expectations aside, they may enjoy this story.
Tif Tamim is a young man who dreams of becoming a dinosaur cowboy – a “buckaroo” – in one of the dinosaur rodeos that travel the fractured United States. Sometime before the start of the story, scientists managed to rip a hole into the Mesozoic era, from which dinosaurs are pulled into the present day. The dinosaurs eventually need to be returned to the Mesozoic to minimize the damage to the timeline, but the rodeos are allowed to keep them for a few years to entertain the masses. Tif’s first rodeo ends in disaster when he accidentally allows a dinosaur to escape, leading to the animal being killed, and he is fired. While searching for a new rodeo to join, Tif agrees to adopt a neglected Carnotaurus that was kept by a local warlord as a pet for his son. Tif’s mission is to return the Carnotaurus to the rip in time so it can spend its final days in its home era.
After Tif takes on the Carnotaurus, I assumed the story would focus on the aspiring buckaroo developing a bond with the animal. However, the dinosaur plays only a small part in the overall story, which is much more about the people Tif meets and his mission to rectify an injustice in his past. All the characters are defined by the grim circumstances of the setting. Tif is a gay man who must be careful about revealing his homosexuality as it would be a death sentence in a U.S. ruled by fundamentalist militias. Another character was captured in a cross-border raid into Canada and brought to the U.S. as a sex slave. Again, this isn’t How to Train Your Dragon, but rather a story about people trying to find happiness and a home in a world that may be permanently broken.
There’s a lot I like about Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur, such as its theme of found family, but a particular standout is the rich prose. Take this snippet, describing the Carnotaurus:
The dinosaur is a Carnotaurus sastrei. Imagine a classic T. rex. King of the killers. Draw it badly: a heavy, dumb-looking head. Ludicrous wiggling arms, like maggots. Too-long legs, a whippy tail. You’ve drawn a Carnotaur. He walks the cracked, dusty verge between the crumbling blacktop and the sage in two-metre strides but his feet are cracked and scabbed, his claws worn to nubs of flaking keratin. His hips move stiffly, his tail drags a furrow in the dust. His eyes are crusted with dried rheum.
My biggest issue with the novella is that we never get to know any of the characters beyond Tif. Just when a character reveals some crucial detail of their backstory, they either disappear entirely from the narrative or just fade into the background. This is a novella that probably would have worked better as a short novel, as the story needed more room to breathe.
That criticism aside, Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur is a work I recommend. If you are looking for a fun adventure with dinosaurs, look elsewhere. But if you can handle the depressing setting, I promise it ends on a hopeful note.
Trivia
- Ian MacDonald is a well-known science fiction writer who has published several works of fiction.
- Yes, I know the above snippet describes the Carnotaurus as dragging its tail, but that is because it has been beaten down by years of abuse. It is not a scientific inaccuracy but instead shows the pitiful state of the animal.
Prehistoric Pulp 