Time to revisit the futuristic dinosaurs with Dinosaur Planet Survivors by Anne Mccaffrey. It is the sequel to Dinosaur Planet and opens with Kai being woken up from cold sleep by the thek Tor an unknown amount of time after the events of the first book. The thek immediately starts investigating the mystery of the duplicate core system that measures the planet’s mineral composition while Kai works on recovering from the cold sleep. After waking Varian up they start exploring the area around the cave where they had slept and encounter the giffs they had previously seen. However, they quickly discover that the giffs are exhibiting some new and unusual behavior that consists of protecting those who had sheltered in the cave but being extremely leery and aggressive towards anybody else. Kai and Varian start suspecting that the mutineers might still be around and decide to be extremely careful about any further exploration and or waking up the rest of the expedition members in cold sleep. Once they actually encounter the remnants of the mutineers things start to quickly get even more complicated.
I rather liked this book, much like I rather liked the previous book, and was intrigued to see how the situation on Ireta continued developing. This book added a lot of extra character development to the characters, more so for some than others. I expected to learn more about Kai and Varian as they are the two narrators and leaders of the expedition. However, what I found interesting was the direction that they went with Lunzie over the course of this book. In the first book she was predominantly a botanist and medic with some discipline training. Here, she exhibits not just some discipline training but a lot of discipline training including what are some rather high-level skills, such as a form of hypnosis that allows her to temporarily alter a person’s personality and memory. That was interesting enough but then it starts to throw in some minor pieces of her backstory, very little overall actually, but just enough to make her seem like this really mysterious person with an even more mysterious background. The idea of her having great-great-great-grandchildren that look either older than or around the same age as her was really unexpected. However, adding that in does add to a rather interesting theme of the book. That is that there are always unexpected dangers and consequences for what happens. Kai sees this firsthand when he unintentionally gets attacked and severely hurt by one of the fringes and they all have to deal with this when they discover just how long they have been in cold sleep. I feel like this whole book is basically a warning that even a supposedly peaceful and normal expedition is never entirely safe and that there is always a risk of danger or things going wrong. Taking all of that into consideration, this book did have a different feel to the first one. That book came across as more of a group of space-faring scientific explorers and this book did not have that feel, primarily because the expedition was attacked at the end of the first book. I do feel like it did a pretty good job of wrapping up the loose ends from the end of the first book. We now know what happened to the mutineers, what happened to the surviving expedition members, what happened to the rest of the expedition group on nearby planets, and why there were two sets of the monitoring cores. Overall, a pretty good job of finishing off the storyline for these characters. I am happy giving this book four out of five stars.
This book was a pretty good example of a science-fiction novel and if you happen to enjoy that genre than I think you would enjoy this work. Keep in mind that much like McCaffrey’s other work this is soft science-fiction with very little in terms of technical details present in the work. If you prefer the harder scifi like star trek than you may not enjoy something like this as much. This book is technically a book for adults but there is not anything in it that would make it unsuitable for readers who are in the teen or young adult age range so if you happen to fall into age range and enjoy science-fiction than you may consider trying this as well. It is a pretty good book and I hope you consider trying it out. If you do feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.