The breakup of Sheol’s one planet causes a rain of meteors on Earth that triggers the Time of Great Dying, the titanic wave of extinctions that wiped out not merely the dinosaurs but thousands of other species of land, sea, and air some sixty-five millions years ago. The end of the Cretaceous saw the slate of life on Earth wiped almost clean.
The nearly emptied world that existed after the great Cretaceous calamity contained abundant empty ecological niches that new forms of life could move into. The age of mammals began, leading ultimately to the earliest hominids.
A great cataclysm did indeed shake the earth some sixty-five million years ago. It caused the end of the Cretaceous Period, just as a similar disaster some two hundred fifty million years ago caused the end of the Permian Period and led to the rise of the dinosaurs.
The dinosaurs began in a planetwide catastrophe that scrubbed away more than half the species then occupying the earth. They died in a paroxysm of similar proportions. The available evidence strongly points to a bombardment of meteors and/or comets that was either accompanied by or actually triggered tectonic shifts of the landmasses that altered sea levels and climate all around the globe.
Stephen Jay Gould and his fellow biologists tell us that these disasters were works of blind nature, brief moments in the grand flow of the eons that forced evolution into new pathways. To the novelist, however, it is irresistibly tempting to assign these evolutionary forces to purposeful characters. It makes for a much more interesting story. It allows us to contemplate the works of nature in moral terms. It turns the blindly uncaring forces of nature into choices made by thinking, feeling characters who know the differences between good and evil.
For myself, I think there is probably much more to the Time of Great Dying than a cataclysmic rain of fire from the heavens, dramatic though that may be. As the Cretaceous was nearing its end a new form of life arose on Earth: a life-form so ubiquitous and lowly that we seldom give it much thought unless we are forced to deal with it directly. That life-form is grass.
Grasses are one of the most successful forms of life on Earth. All the cereal grains that feed humankind are types of grasses, for example. They first appeared on Earth in the late Cretaceous and shouldered earlier forms of vegetation out of existence.
Did grass kill the dinosaurs? Animals that feed on grasses today are equipped with very specialized teeth and digestive systems to crop and metabolize a food that contains a high percentage of tough silica. Could the herbivorous dinosaurs handle the grasses that replaced the earlier vegetation? If they could not and starved, the carnivorous dinosaurs that preyed on the herbivores would have died off, too.
This is mere speculation, however. And it does not explain why so many other life-forms—from plankton to plesiosaurs—died off at the same time. Yet it is instructive to consider that the so-called Time of Great Dying was also a period of birth for new life-forms, the grasses in particular.
So much for what we know of paleontology, and what we speculate. This book is a novel, a work of fiction, and of science fiction at that.
The basic scientific underpinning for this tale is as sound as careful research can make it, although I have taken liberties with agreed-upon scientific canon where I felt it necessary for the sake of the story. As I have throughout all of Orion’s adventures, I have endeavored to use the stuff of myth and legend as a means to explore the human soul; more particularly, to explore the relationship of humankind and its gods.
With an exploding star and a shattered planet we link astronomical events with death and birth on Earth. Intelligent reptiles give rise to the legends of devils that haunt the dark hours of every human culture. Dinosaurs that somehow survived into prehistoric human times lead to our legends of dragons.
And a single human being, created to obey the whims of the gods, strives not merely to survive but to understand, not blindly to obey but to learn how to be a god himself.