The Smoking Gun

Boundary; Eric Flint and Ryk E. Spoor (Baen Books, ISBN 1-4165-0932-1, March 2006. Cover art by Kurt Miller).

Sample chapters here.

Eric Flint was a familiar name to me, thanks to his tireless efforts as a writer and editor at Baen Books, but Ryk Spoor was unfamilar. The book intrigued me thanks to the cover, but I held back on buying it when I saw it in the store...a hardcover, one unfamiliar name...

Eventually I picked it up (or rather downloaded it) from Baen's superb Webscriptions service. Not sure if you want to lay out money for a hardcover? The Webscriptions route is your friend!

Now I need to order the hardcover!

Take a paleontologist who makes a rather strange discovery in the field involving a bunch of raptors and a previously unknown creature (which resembles something out of H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness rather than most previously discovered dinosaurs). Toss in a competition between NASA and private efforts to get to Mars. Stir in a couple of robotic probes that discover Something Is Up around Mars. Shake well. The result? A multi-national expedition to Mars to find out what was happening on Mars and Earth during the age of the dinosaurs.

Good tale, and I look forward to the sequel. Even more interesting was the Tuckerization of one Joe Buckley. Rumor has it that Buckley, who runs this excellent site (download like crazy, folks, it is all free and legal!), managed to annoy one of Baen's authors. That author then proceeded to kill Buckly off in one of his books. Since then many authors have taken up the tradition, killing or maiming Buckley. In this tale, Joe Buckley's alter-ego manages to get by with various wounds.

(Re-read in 2010, in preparation for reading the sequel. Even more fun the second time through!)