Robert J Sawyer - End of an Era (1994)

Read by Lloyd Burns (CNIB)
7:47 unb  32/22 mono  107 MB 

Veteran archaeologist Brandon Thackery fulfills a dinosaur lover's dream when he and colleague-best friend Miles "Klicks" Jordan take history's first time-traveling jaunt back to the late Mesozoic. Hoping to solve the great mystery of dinosaur extinction, Brandon and Klicks use the newly discovered Huang Effect to backtrack into Earth's 65-million-year past. There they discover not only that the earth's gravity is half its twenty-first-century value but that the beings responsible for this are blue-slime creatures from Mars that manipulate the dinosaurs like pawns. 

Meanwhile, back in an alternate time line in which no Huang Effect exists, Brandon discovers an outrageous laptop diary, apparently written by himself, that relates all these incredible adventures; he tracks down a previously unknown Dr. Huang for an explanation. 

Sawyer parlays his enduring enthusiasm for dinosaurs--his last three novels featured them--into refreshing fun and thought-provoking entertainment. He'll satisfy his own fans and those of dinosaurs and old-fashioned time-traveling yarns, too. 


"If Robert J. Sawyer were a corporation, I would buy stock in him. He's on my (extremely short) Buy-On-Sight list, and belongs on yours. End of an Era is one of those rare SF novels that should bring equal pleasure to a 'hard-science' fan, a 'rousing good yarn' reader, or a 'lit'ry' type." --Spider Robinson

"A wonderful read. Sawyer tells his story with that same sense of fun and adventure that SF had in its Golden Age. The difference is he writes from a modern sensibility and his speculations are based on solid research rather than making things up as he needs them, so really, what we're getting here is the best of both worlds." --The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

About the Author
Robert J. Sawyer is the Hugo Award-winning author of Hominids, the Nebula Award-winning author of The Terminal Experiment, and the Aurora Award-winning author of FlashForward, basis for the ABC TV series. He is also the author of Calculating God, Mindscan, the WWW series, Wake, Watch and Wonder, and many other books. He was born in Ottawa and lives in Toronto.