Footprints of Thunder - James F. David - Return of the Dinosaurs

Footprints of Thunder by James F. David is essentially an exercise in hitting the Monster Button. What do I mean by hitting the Monster Button?

Back during the golden age of computer games when games came on 3.5 or even worse 5.25 floppy disks and VGA graphics were state of the art and playing a game required dealing with a form of copyright protection far more irritating than DRM but required you to keep the game manual at hand and input material from random page numbers to prove that you were the rightful owner, a game appeared on the scene called Sim City. While today Sim City has gone through several versions until it reached Sim City 4000, it remains in the shadow of Will Wright's better known Sim Monster, "The Sims".

Sim City was what is commonly called a "god game", that is it allowed you to control the destiny of a large number of people, the Sims, who lived their lives in the streets of Sim City. You were obligated to function as Mayor of Sim City, building it up and solving its traffic, pollution and crime problems. Of course this was hard work and being a god can be exhausting (which is why no one has actually finished playing Black and White) and so many player would get tired of managing the building problems, traffic problems and earthquake and fire cleanup in whichever Sim City you had happened to be controlling and resorted to just stomping around, wrecking the city and causing general havoc and misery for everyone involved. Well aware that human nature calls on us to destroy as much as it calls on us to build, Will Wright included a Monster Button in Sim City which allowed you to access the menu and run a "test" of one of the possible natural disasters that would otherwise randomly affect Sim City, such as a fire, earthquake, tornado, UFO or giant monster attack.

There is a certain kind of Science Fiction novel which arrives with the central purpose of destroying the world or at least hitting the Monster Button and smashing up the landscape royally. Larry Niven's and Jerry Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer is certainly one example. There are plenty of others. Including Footfall by those same authors. The Monster Button is a generic staple of Science Fiction novels and is commonly set in the present day thus also doing duty as a thriller. This kind of novel is essentially a disaster movie with a Science Fiction twist. Giant rabid bats or viruses or unexplained time disasters or UFO's or a solar flare menace the earth and send all our heroes running for cover while they struggle to solve the dilemma.

In Footprints of Thunder, James F. David has come up with what seems at first glance to be an original disaster, namely the collapse of the boundaries of time resulting in the conflation of the present day with fragments of history from the ages when dinosaurs walk the earth. The resulting contact is of course rather unpleasant for both dinosaur and man.

In practice though Footprints of Thunder's premise bears a strong similarity, intended or not, to Murray Leinster's Sidewise in Time, which was also the story credited as being the birth of the parallel universe tale. Footprints of Thunder of course deals with a fragmentation of the boundaries of time while Sidewise in Time dealt with the fragmentation of the boundaries of alternate universe but sections of Footprints of Thunder, particularly those dealing with the professors have a certain similarity to Sidewise in Time, perhaps as a homage.

Like all Monster Button novels, Footprints of Thunder follows a fairly simple formula. We have the diverse scattering of characters whom we encounter before the Monster Button is pushed. Predictably one or more of the characters will have been aware that the Monster Button is about to be pushed and will have been going around ringing his bell and shouting, "The End is Near" while no one paid attention to him until it was too late. We have the usual law enforcement types and the human interest features. The villains and the heroes all dealing with the catastrophic disaster unfolding around them.

Footprints of Thunder however treats the material so lightly it might almost be spoofing it. The President is fantastically incompetent, even by the standard of disaster movie presidents. He's put to bed and woken up by his female Chief of Staff who functions as his surrogate mother and lets him sleep even when major terrorist attacks take place. His chief science advisor is a dimmer apathetic version of Carl Sagan. His actual science advisor is a former friend with a thing for young girls. The President spends most of Footprints of Thunder making the worst possible decisions imaginable when he isn't being completely useless.

The rest of the cast is rounded out by three teenage boys, only one of which, Ripman, is at all memorable. Their parents, one of whom a clinical psychologist, winds up in the middle of a hostage situation produced by the aforementioned bell ringer and gets caught up with a mysterious colonel as well as his wife, who tries to find her children in a city that no longer exists and instead winds up being chased around by dinosaurs and bikers. And then there are two professors, both of whom get gruesomely torn apart by the dinos. And then there's Petra and her dim boyfriend who prevail over all obstacles. Then there's a dim lazy cop who is saddled with climbing tasks he doesn't want. Finally there's an elderly lady who befriends a dinosaur in what is probably the best and only genuinely worthwhile part of the novel.

Footprints of Thunder is a novel by a first time writer and that shows all too clearly in the exaggerated kookiness of the characters. It might be mistaken for parody simply because James F. David is clearly doing his best to compensate for character depth with wackiness. The result is almost a comedy except there are people getting eaten in progressively ugly ways. The entire plot involving the President planning to drop a nuclear bomb to save Atlanta appears to be headed somewhere, except as it turns out, it isn't.

While Footprints of Thunder is marketed as Science Fiction it properly isn't. It's essentially a disaster movie packaged in novel form with a quirky premise about nuclear bombs tearing open the fourth dimension, which serves primarily as a justification for hitting the Monster Button and setting the dinosaurs loose.