Xenozoic Tales - After The End!

I love dinosaurs! And in that regard I'm like almost every other kid of my generation and includes Mark Schultz, the man who gave us Xenozoic Tales. Xenozoic Tales are a amazing batch of stories detailing a far but recognizable future when the Earth has suffered a massive trauma and civilization as we know it crumbled. The survivors held on and centuries after today cobbled together a new  society, but one tucked into a world in which massive dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals of all kinds dominated the landscape. 

We meet Jack Tenrec a man with a respect and talent for machinery but a devotion to the natural order. He is a man with some secrets, some we learn as the story unfolds. He is matched by Hannah Dundee, a beautiful ambassador from Wassoon, a culture dominated by its relationship to the sea and has come to the "City in the Sea" for reasons which are not fully understood, hut which we learn. She and Jack face off against natural threats, violent poachers, dangerous politicians, and each other as they seek to understand one another and to do what they need to do.

Jack has access to ancient technology and so recuperates old cars such as his favorite, a vintage Cadillac. When the series is later reprinted in color and brought to television in animated form it will be known as Cadillacs and Dinosaurs. But I've always preferred Xenozoic Tales.

There are a host of weird and dangerous secrets in the wilderness which surrounds the City in the Sea and men who venture there are not safe and not in control.

That lack of control, that need to come to grips with nature and to accomplish goals in harmony with the powers of nature is really the core theme of these stories. This is not mankind as the dominant species, but mankind as just one more species in a mysterious world.

It's a story of man contending with nature, albeit a nature unknown to us today, but still about trying to build, to hunt, to fish, to find a way forward. Survival in this new world is not certain by any means.

Jack and Hannah find many secrets alone and together and they constantly fight to stay alive in a world that is actually  quite indifferent to that fact.

As the plague which has put our own society on a tilt has proven, the natural world is a mighty thing and man's dominance is tenuous and momentary. Like Hannah and Jack we fight for survival all the time we just don't know about it. But ignorance will not save us, only understanding and courage. 

The fisrt volume of Xenozoic Tales is dubbed "After the End" and I hope that's not some dark prophecy for our own times.

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