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A paleontologist sits in his office, studying ancient dinosaur tracks and extrapolating the scene in the ancient past that created them. And then a man walks in with a job offer and a cooler containing the head of a freshly-dead stegosaurus.
Bones of the Earth is a celebration of dinosaurs and the pursuit of knowledge, wrapped around a lot of twisty time travel and the adventures of time-traveling paleontologists, some of whom get trapped in time and keep getting distracted from their observations by the subjects of their study trying to eat them.
I’ve re-read this book and The Iron Dragon’s Daughter every couple years since they came out, though I’ve never fallen in love with any of Swanwick’s other novels. (I haven’t yet read The Iron Dragon’s Mother.)
But what I really want to talk about is the ending, which I recall was extremely polarizing. In fact I recall that most people hated it. I loved it. For me the ending took the book from being an exceptionally good sf adventure to being something that would stay with me ever since I read it.
At the end, it turns out that the reason time travel exists is that far, far in the future, not only humans but all mammals are extinct. The intelligent species are descended from birds, which are of course a type of dinosaur. A group of bird-men, who are of course also dinosaur-men, are studying mammals in general and humans in particular, with the love for us that the human paleontologists have for dinosaurs. They gave us time travel to set up conditions for studying what they see as our most striking characteristic, which is our curiosity and drive to acquire knowledge.
Now that the study is over, they are taking back time travel. The events of the entire book, from page one when Griffin brought a stegosaurus head into Leyster’s office, will vanish and have never have happened – including the bird people’s experiment and their experiences doing it.
When our characters learn of this, they request that they be allowed to rescue their lost colleagues before the experiment is ended. "Why?" ask the bird people. After all, shortly it will be irrelevant – their colleagues will have never been lost at all, and if they’re rescued, that rescue will also be undone. “It’s a human thing,” Griffin says. “You wouldn’t understand.”
The bird people give them the equipment for the rescue. We see that unfold, both the rescue itself and the aftermath. Each member of the lost expedition (who aren’t told about the bird people or that everything will be undone/never be) celebrates and muses on the experience in their own individual ways. Meanwhile, the people who do know that everything will unravel and never be spend their last hours in various ways: having sex, taking a last trip to the Mesozoic, etc.
At the very end, Griffin and his future self, the Old Man, have a conversation about whether there was any point to any of it, given that it will all be undone and vanish. The Old Man proposes a thought experiment. Imagine that Griffin is a prisoner with no means of contacting the outside world, who will never be released. His cell has a window, and a bird builds a nest and lays eggs in it. He could eat the eggs, train the hatchlings, etc. What does he do?
Griffin answers that he would study the lifecycle of the birds. No one will ever know what he learned, but he wants to know for its own sake.
The ending of the book is the best exploration of existentialism I’ve ever read. All through the book, everyone has spent their lives and risked their lives and sometimes died for the sake of studying something which has no practical application and is long since vanished – the dinosaurs. Before Griffin steps into his office, Leyster and Salley have already devoted their lives to dinosaurs, which are extinct and will never come back. There are “ghosts” in the fossil record – things which can be extrapolated but have been lost to time. And yet all of their work is worthwhile, even though the subject of their study is gone and much of it will be unknowable.
The ending turns the mirror back on humanity, in a broader scale. As individuals, we will die and much of our lives will be forgotten. Eventually, we will go extinct as a species. Any one person’s life and study, in the vast spread of time, will be lost. Millennia from now, this book review and the book itself and me and Michael Swanwick will be gone and unremembered, as if we had never been. Does that mean there’s no point to us ever having existed?
The sequence of the book after we know all will be lost forever is joyous, not despairing; bittersweet, but the sweetness is real. Some of the characters have no idea that everything is about to vanish, and they celebrate their lives and rescue; so we all live, with no idea whether or not we might die in the next moment. Some of the characters do know their current selves will vanish, which is a kind of death, and they choose how to live the rest of their time.
The entire book, beginning to end, is a thought experiment about meaning in the face of impermanence. All the events in it will vanish utterly, will have never been. Do they then not matter? Or do they matter exactly as much as they would have had the book ended without the revelation of what was going to happen?
If everything we are and make will be lost, then we decide whether that makes it all pointless, or whether the point is whatever it was in the moment, not in the idea that it will be preserved for all eternity; if there is no meaning but what we make, then everything we do is meaningful.
The book concludes as two iterations of the same person stand in a moment that is about to vanish forever, exactly as all moments vanish forever, watching the dinosaurs they love and remarking on the beauty of the day.
Bones of the Earth
Bones of the Earth is a celebration of dinosaurs and the pursuit of knowledge, wrapped around a lot of twisty time travel and the adventures of time-traveling paleontologists, some of whom get trapped in time and keep getting distracted from their observations by the subjects of their study trying to eat them.
I’ve re-read this book and The Iron Dragon’s Daughter every couple years since they came out, though I’ve never fallen in love with any of Swanwick’s other novels. (I haven’t yet read The Iron Dragon’s Mother.)
But what I really want to talk about is the ending, which I recall was extremely polarizing. In fact I recall that most people hated it. I loved it. For me the ending took the book from being an exceptionally good sf adventure to being something that would stay with me ever since I read it.
At the end, it turns out that the reason time travel exists is that far, far in the future, not only humans but all mammals are extinct. The intelligent species are descended from birds, which are of course a type of dinosaur. A group of bird-men, who are of course also dinosaur-men, are studying mammals in general and humans in particular, with the love for us that the human paleontologists have for dinosaurs. They gave us time travel to set up conditions for studying what they see as our most striking characteristic, which is our curiosity and drive to acquire knowledge.
Now that the study is over, they are taking back time travel. The events of the entire book, from page one when Griffin brought a stegosaurus head into Leyster’s office, will vanish and have never have happened – including the bird people’s experiment and their experiences doing it.
When our characters learn of this, they request that they be allowed to rescue their lost colleagues before the experiment is ended. "Why?" ask the bird people. After all, shortly it will be irrelevant – their colleagues will have never been lost at all, and if they’re rescued, that rescue will also be undone. “It’s a human thing,” Griffin says. “You wouldn’t understand.”
The bird people give them the equipment for the rescue. We see that unfold, both the rescue itself and the aftermath. Each member of the lost expedition (who aren’t told about the bird people or that everything will be undone/never be) celebrates and muses on the experience in their own individual ways. Meanwhile, the people who do know that everything will unravel and never be spend their last hours in various ways: having sex, taking a last trip to the Mesozoic, etc.
At the very end, Griffin and his future self, the Old Man, have a conversation about whether there was any point to any of it, given that it will all be undone and vanish. The Old Man proposes a thought experiment. Imagine that Griffin is a prisoner with no means of contacting the outside world, who will never be released. His cell has a window, and a bird builds a nest and lays eggs in it. He could eat the eggs, train the hatchlings, etc. What does he do?
Griffin answers that he would study the lifecycle of the birds. No one will ever know what he learned, but he wants to know for its own sake.
The ending of the book is the best exploration of existentialism I’ve ever read. All through the book, everyone has spent their lives and risked their lives and sometimes died for the sake of studying something which has no practical application and is long since vanished – the dinosaurs. Before Griffin steps into his office, Leyster and Salley have already devoted their lives to dinosaurs, which are extinct and will never come back. There are “ghosts” in the fossil record – things which can be extrapolated but have been lost to time. And yet all of their work is worthwhile, even though the subject of their study is gone and much of it will be unknowable.
The ending turns the mirror back on humanity, in a broader scale. As individuals, we will die and much of our lives will be forgotten. Eventually, we will go extinct as a species. Any one person’s life and study, in the vast spread of time, will be lost. Millennia from now, this book review and the book itself and me and Michael Swanwick will be gone and unremembered, as if we had never been. Does that mean there’s no point to us ever having existed?
The sequence of the book after we know all will be lost forever is joyous, not despairing; bittersweet, but the sweetness is real. Some of the characters have no idea that everything is about to vanish, and they celebrate their lives and rescue; so we all live, with no idea whether or not we might die in the next moment. Some of the characters do know their current selves will vanish, which is a kind of death, and they choose how to live the rest of their time.
The entire book, beginning to end, is a thought experiment about meaning in the face of impermanence. All the events in it will vanish utterly, will have never been. Do they then not matter? Or do they matter exactly as much as they would have had the book ended without the revelation of what was going to happen?
If everything we are and make will be lost, then we decide whether that makes it all pointless, or whether the point is whatever it was in the moment, not in the idea that it will be preserved for all eternity; if there is no meaning but what we make, then everything we do is meaningful.
The book concludes as two iterations of the same person stand in a moment that is about to vanish forever, exactly as all moments vanish forever, watching the dinosaurs they love and remarking on the beauty of the day.
Bones of the Earth
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It's a really remarkable novel. And it honestly may be one of my new all-time favorite literary endings, too.
From:
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And it fits so well with the subject matter. If you accept the premise that paleontology is worthwhile, even though so much of the record is vanished and there's no practical application, then the ending follows exactly from that.
From:
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Ooh. I've never read this (or, to be honest, knew of its existence?!) but I'll have to put it on my list.
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