Preview of Dinosaur Summer Summary:

Many science fiction novels written for adults are crossover books that appeal to young readers who enjoy imaginative tales of exotic adventure.

Bear has written many such books, but Dinosaur Summer is written specifically for the same young adult market as the book that inspired it, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912; see separate entry, Vol. 4). Both novels appeal to adults as well as their intended young adult readers. In Dinosaur Summer, Bear treats The Lost World as if it were an historical document, with the characters in the earlier book being real people whose adventures on an isolated plateau in South America really happened.

In Bear's novel, the discovery of dinosaurs was sensational news in 1912, but by the late 1940s interest in them has waned almost to the point of public indifference. Lothar Gluck's Dinosaur Circus, one of the last remaining circuses with dinosaurs, has been losing...