“What hour is it?” I asked, reaching instinctively for my pocketwatch.
Malik took a step back. “Time for Kentrosaurus to hatch. Time to plant the millet. Time for the magnolia buds to open. Professor Denison, I’m afraid you persist in thinking of time as numbers. You think of meaningless units of time - weeks, hours, minutes - based on what? Movements of faraway planets? Of what use to us is that? Why not pay attention to the precise 30-year life cycle of the bamboo Guadua trinii or the exactly repeated mitotic cycle of the paramecium? The whole Earth has a heartbeat.”
He paused, swung his tail from side to side, and squinted. “And some things happen too slowly for you to notice. If you sit quite still, you can hear the grinding down of mountains, the stretching upwards of trees, the pushing forward of continents.”
CODE OF DINOTOPIA
Survival of all or none
One raindrop raises the sea
Weapons are enemies even to their owners
Give more, take less
Others first, self last
Observe, listen and learn
Sing every day
Excercise imagination
Eat to live, don’t live to eat
Don’t p…
The Code of Dinotopia was only created after humans, who need such wisdom written down to remind them of it, arrived on the island. Nallab, Assistant Head Librarian of Waterfall City, believes the last coda was meant exclusively for humans:
“Don’t pee in the tub.”
Holy shit I entirely forgot about dinotopia but yeah it absolutely was a formative piece of anti capitalist literature from my childhood
I bet the Venn diagram overlap of communists and dinosaur lovers is entirely attributable to this book.
Gurney wrote three books himself: A Land Apart From Time, The World Beneath, and The First Flight.
Then there’s an anthology collection of like 15 children’s novels by different authors, each telling a contained story about life in Dinotopia.
We don’t talk about the miniseries
I think you forget that the miniseries had an American become the mayor of Dinotopia who proceeded to bulldoze everything to create carparks for the cars exclusively manufactured by himself until getting otherthrown by means of every other inhabitant of Dinotopia in concert gaslighting him to think he was never mayor.
