Thomas Diehl writes:
Fiction Science starts with Jurassic Park/World

Available now at Amazon, free to read for Kindle Unlimited subscribers

Jurassic Park. I freely admit I am the result of a boy being at just the right age when 90′s dinomania rolled around and having been enamoured with dinosaurs even before that point, JP never left me. So of course I was going to do something with Jurassic World coming up. Not to mention I managed to use being European to my advantage with Jurassic World starting one day early over here.

Jurassic Park/World. It comes with great hype. And with great hype comes great responsibility. That might be from a different media franchise, but it still holds true. And it’s the reason people on the internet get upset about the scientific accuracy of the dinosaurs in the series. Well, that and them being people on the internet, getting upset at stuff is part of the appeal. Anyway, I decided to collect all the scientific inaccuracies into a book. So I went through all canonical JP media with eyes open for this kind of thing and started collecting.

There is, of course, a lot to talk about: Naked raptors! Half-blind T. rex! Bunny handed Gallimimus! Dilopho-That-Is-Not-Even-A-Dinosaur-Saurus! Holyshittasaurus Indominus rex! If it’s a prehistoric animal and in either of the movies, the novels, or the Telltale game, I put it in.

What I did was, I wrote this over the course of the last month watching all movies and trailers, re-reading the novels and watching a Playthrough of the Telltale game. I ignored the comics and other games for not being in any sort of canon. Also, finding all errors in the builder games would probably take years just from those games’ sheer size. Of course, not everything in Jurassic Park that looks different from paleontology textbooks is an error. Some things are artistic license, showing things that are possible even if paleontologists can’t confirm it to be true. And some are just the result of the original movie being 22 years old when during those 22 years science’s idea of what dinosaurs looked like has been revolutionized by new findings. This book explains those things.
After that I took advantage of my european-ness, watched the earliest screening of Jurassic World I could get and made that tax-deductible and finished the book with new knowledge gained from that, adding a short chapter on Indominus rex in the process.

With this book, I also started a series, “Fiction Science”. This is something I wanted to do for quite some time. A series of books about the science in science fiction. More books will come out over time, though this one is somewhat special in being about a specific series. Future installments will be about things like FTL travel, alien design, or why we don’t have jetpacks and hoverboards everywhere yet. However, with dinosaurs there is simply too much to go through without focussing on a single franchise. The release of Jurassic World was just perfect for this book to come out, so I timed it accordingly.

So far, I am very happy with the result. The book sports high quality, a simple yet effective cover, starts a new series and also makes an excellent test run for creating titles that tie in to current events.
It’s also free with Kindle Unlimited because I wanted to test that market and I believe a media tie-in title is perfect for KU’s borrowing approach to books. This is a book basically meant to be borrowed and read quickly after seeing the movie(s). I am quite anxious to see how well that works.

Oh, for the record: Jurassic World is really, reallly fun. Not as good as the first movie, but still one of the most fun movie I’ve seen in years.

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