To begin with let me say that this book was always intended to be fun! Nothing more, nothing less. A friend gave me the idea of scientists from our future travelling back to the Mesozoic Era, the time of the dinosaurs, for ecological reasons. I liked it. I liked it a lot! One of the reasons for being captivated by this notion is that I have been fascinated by dinosaurs since I was five years old. Occasionally, I consider myself an amateur palaeontologist, although lately the pace at which new dinosaurs are being discovered, described, and studied has become breathtakingly fast and I have found it difficult to keep up. Another reason is that I have always loved those adventure stories in which people come face to face with exotic animals, the original 1933 King Kong for example, or Jules Vernes ‘Mysterious Island’.

The underlying reason for the scientists being in the Mesozoic is that they are studying how life survives major extinction events. There have been at least five major extinction events in the Earth’s history that science has so far discovered. Science has revealed that each time life has bounced back from the lip of the abyss of total destruction with new forms of animals and plants that are often more advanced and more diverse than previously. I think that this gave the idea of expending vast amounts of resources to study prehistoric life in its actual environment a more credible basis than just capitalism.

It was always my aim to depict the various animals encountered in the story in the way that palaeontologists understand them. They are not the blood thirsty monsters of Jurassic Park. For the most part they show little interest in the humans that have invaded their world. There is friction between them, you cannot have an adventure without friction, but this is mostly the result of accident rather than design on either part. The dinosaurs remain animals throughout. The predators show no obsessive need to eat a human creature when they encounter one; why would they? Predatory dinosaurs, large or small, evolved to hunt particular prey. The dromaeosaurs family, to which Jurassic Park’s ‘raptors’ belong, show no suggestion of being as smart as dolphins or capable of opening doors. They were as intelligent as they needed to be catch, kill, and eat their prey, which was often not as fast, agile, or any smarter than them.

Technically, Mesozoic taught me how to write a story that moves at pace. Each chapter had to have something exciting happening in it, as a result they are generally shorter than the ones I had written in my previous novels. Short chapters just seem to help a reader feel as if the book is moving more quickly. It is something that has to be considered when writing in a different genre. Long contemplative passages simply do not work when you are being chased by a Tyrannosaurus that you managed to anger.

Personally, I like Mesozoic. It combines many different elements that I enjoy, science, adventure, humour, human nature, and takes a different approach to throwing people and dinosaurs together using the tried and trusted vehicle of time travel. It also has several strong female characters who were fun to write because they do not stand shivering in the corner waiting for the men to save them.