Footprints of Thunder by James F. David

Thunder #1

by James F. David

It began with a rain of corn falling from an empty sky, and with the unheeded warnings of a handful of eccentric scientists and college students. Only they saw the disaster coming, but nobody listened to them until... Suddenly, overnight, the boundaries between yesterday and today dissolve, transforming the entire world into a crazy-quilt mixture of the present and the distant past. Portland, Oregon, turns into a primeval forest, where a vicious motorcycle gang takes advantage of the chaos to hunt both tyrannosaurs and innocent human beings. Plesiosaurs are spotted off the coast of Hawaii, while a stranded family struggles to survive a savage conflict between an enraged brontosaurus and a bloodthirsty pack of killer whales. Winged reptiles, extinct for millennia, swoop from the sky to carry off small children. Looters battle dinosaurs in the Bronx, where one old woman, alone and forgotten, discovers a new reason to live. And in the White House an increasingly unstable President searches for a solution - any solution - to the catastrophe that has gripped the planet. But the cure he is presented with may be worse than the disease.

Genres: Science Fiction, Dinosaurs, Fiction, Time Travel, Fantasy, Adventure, Thriller

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

James F. David has a Ph.D. from Ohio State University and is currently a professor of Psychology as George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon. He is the author of the thrillers Footprints of Thunder, Ship of the Damned and Before the Cradle Falls. He lives with his wife and three daughters in Tigard, Oregon.

Reviews

[Montzalee Wittmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Footprints of Thunder (Paperback) by James F. David is a long but good sci fi about time waves that that were caused by things like large explosions. These time waves caused places, people, things to appear and disappear. When the big event happens, there are large cities gone replaced by forest, swamps, and things that live in them...prehistoric things. The story follows several people during the book and how they deal with it all. Very interesting!

[Jeff Powers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Footprints of Thunder was an enjoyable read, filled with what it promised, modern humans dealing with dinosaurs. James David, takes the tried and true elements of Jurassic Park and explodes them to a global scale. This is post apocalyptic fiction, where the apocalypse is the emergence of Dinosaurs. It started off fast paced and delivered on the action. It gets extra points just for being dino scifi, but it does tend to bog down a bit in the middle, suffer from a few too many characters and a limited grasp of a big picture plot. But this isn't that kind of story, this is more about how this event effects a few lives, rather than how a few people manage to fix the event. It does lose points for me for falling into the tiresome gang of post apocalyptic rapists trope . We have man eating dinosaurs around and we still need the biggest threat to the female characters to be sexual assault? Apart from that, it was enjoyable enough to be a passable summer scifi thriller, a bit beyond the norm if you really like dinosaurs .

[Kristin · Rating 2 out of 5]

A fun dino romp bogged down by padding, paper-thin characters, and an abruptly vague ending. David can't bear to kill off major characters, so he generates suspense with a running sub-plot about *sexual assault*. The only dinosaur books that should make you feel this dirty are self-published erotica.

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved it. Another success from browsing the clearance shelves of Half Price Books. The writing is amazing and he clearly looked up details to all the science in the book. It was smart, interesting and something that I could not put down.

[Georgia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Incredibly strange book. Dinosaurs have been added to modern America and Portland has been taken away. This is because of nuclear bombs???? Admittedly I'm not really into post-apocalyptic novels but I was recommended this by a colleague as similar to The Meg in terms of silliness. It was very very silly, so it delivered on that point. Almost every character died, with some very strange side characters and subplots. It was also never very clear who exactly were supposed to be the main characters.

Also, this was written in the mid 90s but all the dinosaurs are portrayed as having limp, dragging tails. This seems a little behind the times, but I could be wrong there.

[Wanda Pedersen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed this adventure, where a time distortion brings bits of the Cretaceous (and other ages) to the present and sends bits of the present off to who-knows-when. People start digging out their children's dinosaur books to identify that creatures wandering down the street. Those who are unlucky enough to be in rural areas when the distortion takes place practice their running-and-hiding skills.

There are a lot of (human) characters to keep track of--I had been reading a chapter or two on my lunch hour, but finally had to take the book home & finish it off to get smoother, less jerky sense of what was going on. I would recommend the more continuous read. But that was me, not the book.

I thought the dinosaur behaviour was well depicted. I loved the nesting pleisiosaur, the apatosaurus that some ship-wrecked folks cling to and the general variety of dinosaurs that show up. It has made me wonder exactly how effective modern guns would be when dealing with large carnosaurs? They have pretty tiny brains and I wonder how useful head-shots would be? But, for the sake of the story, I was willing to suspend any questions that I had on that matter.

This would have been a four-star book except for two complaints. 1) The Cretaceous areas that appear in our time have GRASS in them. [We are children of the grasslands, our ancestors having stood at the forest-edge, peering out onto the savannahs and wondering what life would be like out there--but grasses didn't appear until the Paleocene. Dinosaurs didn't eat them. We can barely imagine life without them]. 2) At one point, an injured theropod falls to its "knees." Dinosaurs, like modern birds, have legs in different proportions than mammals. What looks to us like a knee, is actually the ankle, bending the opposite direction of the knee. A theropod falling to its knees would actually be falling on its face, not what the author intended in the scene.

Still, I enjoyed the book very much, despite my quibbles above. Three bloody, scary stars.

[Lynn Dubinsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a fun book! A bit too scifi at some parts, but I really enjoyed this a whole lot. Read over half of it by the pool today.

Probably won't read the second or third book though. They sound a bit silly. A T rex on the moon? Really? Ugh.

[Greg · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too much set up, too little carnage. The characters were mere sketches, and I never could really relate to them. Stick to Crichton!

[Ruby · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is like if jurassic park was worse and made less sense. The idea is kind of cool but it wasn't very well executed. It was also very focused on america and portland specifically, which is fine but I don't care about them personally.
I hated all the characters, because every single one of them was so incredibly stupid. It was funny at first but it really started to grate about a third of the way into the book and made it difficult to care about what was going on. The only reason it gets 3 stars is because you get to watch a lot of these really stupid characters die terrible deaths.

[Tommy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Obviously, if you like Jurassic Park, you'll probably like this. I think I enjoyed it every bit as much. Which is a lot, because I really love gigantic rampaging dinos and constant mortal peril. FOOTPRINTS OF THUNDER deals with bizarre time displacement theories, and a "time quilt" effect. There were a lot of characters to keep track of, but I didn't find it too difficult because each group of characters ends up in very different circumstances, faced with different terrain and different beasties. David does a good job of creating characters you care about, both human and saurian. But don't get too attached, because some really brutal things happen. Almost enough to push this book into the horror genre. Some of the scenes were pretty horrific, and that's what I was hoping for. LOTS of action, lots of unexpected twists and turns. Now I can't wait to read the sequel, and then the third book. I'm in!

[donna backshall · Rating 3 out of 5]

The quilt idea was unique and I would even say intriguing, but the follow-through was too aggressive. There were simply too many characters and scenarios, which left me uneasy ("Wait, which group is this?") and constantly pulled me out of the story. I found myself unable to care about what was happening to each and every one of the groups, mainly because from chapter to chapter I had to expend so much energy transitioning to someone or something new.

In a way, I felt like I was watching a news program, giving humanitarian effort-style glimpses of the devastation around the country.

If you get ambitious and throw in too much complexity, you're bound to leave loose ends. This book leaves the reader holding a frayed rope.

[Shelly Kotalik · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think if you liked Jurassic Park, you'd like this. It involves dinosaurs and science. However, that's where the similarity ends. It's an interesting and memorable book that I read quickly. I just found out there is a sequel which I intend to read. Warning for animal lovers: a gutwrenching scene involving a mother and baby dinosaur and a pack of killer whales seemed entirely unnecessary to me. If not for that, I'd give it five stars.

[Manny · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book can best be described as the movie equivalent of a popcorn flick. I was thinking back to Jurassic Park and was looking for a similar book, and while this just doesn't have the depth or believable storyline of that classic, it does have lots of action and good characters. The actual rating is closer to a 4. If you love dinosaurs, and who doesn't, you'll easily breeze through this one.

[Brannigan · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s a fun idea, but it isn’t executed in a way that was able to keep me interested. It’s a science fiction story heavy on the science. Not in an academically accurate way but the majority of the protagonists were in one or more of the fields of science. There were also too many characters and side stories. It helped to flesh out the world but made it harder to connect or get invested in anyone.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one gets a four for concept and a three for execution. It was pretty good but I kept wanting a bit more from the characters and story.

[Veronica]

Couldn't bring myself to finish this.

[Everette Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a decent book but didn't seem to be going anywhere.

[Andy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Decent premise ruined by pedestrian writing, poor editing, and uninteresting characters.

[Ashley Lambert-Maberly · Rating 1 out of 5]

You know that guy—you're talking about some great Indian place, and he interrupts with some spiel about how awful it is, it's inauthentic, it's some crap Westernized version of Indian food, and you must have awfully low standards if you can stomach it? Well, I'm that guy, and this book is that restaurant.

I've seen other reviews where readers referred to the characters as thin, or not particularly fleshed-out. People, c'mon. There's thin, and then there's "behaving like no adult human every did or would." The book really reminded me of some of my fiction in my teens, when (despite writing well for a teenager) I was fairly certain I didn't have a clue how grown-ups really acted around each other, and I was probably safest not exploring topics like "The White House," or "marriage," or "Business meeting." Mr. David had some fine descriptive passages, a few moments of interesting activity, but the moment he had characters speak, think, or decide to do something, I cringed. (I'm calling him Mr. David to be polite, but I suspect he's about 13, especially since he seems to think it's marvelous to not get woken up by Mommy--sorry, I meant "by his Chief of Staff," unless it's really really really really important).

I made it a third of the way through, but eventually (after checking other reviews) I realised this collection of unbelievable named-people weren't going to coalesce into interesting, believable people. I like dinosaurs as much as the next guy, but this isn't worth it. I am flabbergasted this got onto anyone's list of best sf.

I don't have time to list all the many things that irked me, beginning with the "Dramatis Personae" at the beginning (beginning with the ridiculous description of Kenny Randall as "student at Oregon Institute of Technology, and a member of the group," but that's a great place to start, if you're wondering about reading this. By the time you get to "Rita Watkins, stranded motorist" you will know if this is the book for you.

P.S. As a Canadian, sometimes the attitude that America is the only important place in the world particularly grates. And I get it, you write about what you know (hopefully). But when you are writing about a world-changing event, it seems particularly parochial to only write about Americans in America.

(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s). I feel a lot of readers automatically render any book they enjoy 5, but I grade on a curve!

[James Cunningham · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I started this I was telling everyone it was as good as Jurassic Park, and if it had stayed like that I would have an interesting thing to say about how sometimes you can judge a book by its cover, yadda, yadda, yadda … but it didn’t. Midway through, my wife asked me how it was going and I said, “fine.” By the end, I was pretty disappointed. First of all, the author works hard to develop a bunch of disparate plot lines (ala The Stand), but then doesn’t resolve but a couple of them, and the others are glossed over or not even touched on, and you’re left wondering how, what and why about those other plot lines.

But mostly, the writing just gets worse somehow. In places, it veers off into that weird amateurish thing that newbie writers do when they over-detail things that don’t matter: i.e., ‘He pivoted on his right foot and turned to his left placing his weight on his left hip and raising his foot …’ like that … during what otherwise would have been high drama and suspense scenes. I’ve seen it a million times and it’s typical of people when they first start writing. So it makes me think that parts of this book were written when the author first decided to try his hand at writing, and then he set it aside to come back and finish it after he knew what he was doing, but didn’t feel like doing the hard work rewriting/reimagining the tedious sections he’d gotten down on paper years earlier. (Just a guess based on how it reads.)

Also, if you remember, Jurassic Park told us they could clone dinosaurs using DNA found in amber … without having to explain the rest. This book gets deep in the weeds of heavy physics, dense matter and all that, needlessly. I don’t need your PhD thesis of how and why dinosaurs came to our time -- it’s not real.

The characters and their stories were great, but the book petered out in the last third so badly that I lost all the enthusiasm I had for the book in the first third.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book seems to owe a great deal to the 1934 short story Sideways in Time by Murray Leinster. In that story, the world was divided into many fragments of alternate timelines overlaying our world; a crazy quilt of our timeline mixed with many others.

It also owes a lot to the 1977 novel Time Storm by Gordon Dickson, in which time had collapsed, dividing the world into fragments of past & future time.

Footprints of Thunder kept it simpler - the world is fragmented between present time and slices of the world from the end of the Cretaceous period. Dinosaur vs human action ensues. Jurassic Park did it better.

The freshest and most original part of this book was the idea that nuclear explosions over a certain size generate "time waves", in addition to blast, radiation, and EMP waves. When the "time wave" of one explosion intersects or merges with the "time wave" of another explosion, temporal displacement occurs. This is given as the explanation of many Charles Fort-style appearances, disappearance, rains of fish, corn, manna from heaven, etc.

Other than that interesting background concept, the book is a light read, dragging somewhat in the middle as dinosaur attack follows dinosaur attack.

First read this back in the late 90s and enjoyed it. Just re-read it with a somewhat more critical attitude. Still an enjoyable book but most of the characters were unremarkable. The parts with the two women being chased through the forest by both human and dinosaur predators struck me as unnecessary and brought about because most of the characters made foolish decisions in situations where they should have known better.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

A perfectly servicable mid-90s dinosaur thriller, that a cynic might accuse of trying to piggyback on the success of Jurassic Park, that I found a decent enough read.

Picked it up for the dinosaurs, but ended up finding the parts which focus on the scientists and politicians trying to deal with the time phenomenon (ludicriously referred to as "TimeQuilt") that's swapped parts of present day Earth with their prehistoric counterparts to be the more interesting aspect. There's a couple of interesting sequences with the dinos, but it's mostly same old, same old. Wounded dinosaur stalks the person who took its eye, smaller carnivores scatter before the reveal of the big one, a ceratopsian charges a vehicle, all stuff you've probably seen done better elsewhere. It's not done poorly, it's just a touch derivative.

Suffers more from having no clear protagonist, we're constantly jumping between viewpoints and no single character gets any real depth or development to them. Too many of them end up being little more than stock characters or walking tropes. The POV which ends up serving as the climax was also probably the one I found least interesting out of all of them, too.

Still, I did enjoy the more sci-fi side of things, and the early parts of the novel which focus on the chaos and confusion that sets in after the initial event are great and makes the choice to go with constant POV switches understandable, as it shines here. On the whole, it's hardly groundbreaking, but made for a decent page turner.

[Karl · Rating 4 out of 5]

I quite enjoyed this book but it's not for everyone. If you can't turn a blind eye to dodgy science and need your books to have a deep meaning, then this simply isn't the book for you. On the other hand, if all you want out of the book are dinosaurs, people running (and failing to run) from said dinosaurs and some brief glimpses into the lives of the people affected, then this book is probably one of the better ones out there. It's written well enough to never get in your way and the format works really well to build up the tension between chapters. Some stories did feel less relevant than others (I hope we see some of the same people in the sequel) and most didn't intersect in any meaningful way, some being completely isolated. And the ending was rather... abrupt. Not bad, it was built up well enough through 370+ pages but the wrap-up felt... too short and not particularly satisfying. Knowing there's a sequel put some of my mind at ease but consider the two books are ten years apart, if I read this back in the day I'd probably be a bit more upset.

Still, I'm currently trying to chase down the sequel as we speak so clearly I liked it enough. And who knows, you might too!

[Kale Link · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this book because I'm a big fan of dinosaurs, apocalyses, and time travel. While the book was mildly entertaining, there were a few things that were a little off-putting. If you're a big dinosaur fan, the book is lacking in scientific accuracy and doesn't bring a whole lot new to the table when it comes to the dinosaur descriptions or interactions. I had trouble suspending my disbelief for several of the plot points (ex: random psychologist leaving his wife to fly across the country with a stranger to meet with the president). The mystery of why the time quilt occurred and how to reverse is a long and drug-out mystery that isn't exactly resolved by the end (maybe there's more books, I guess). The cast of characters is very large, and the constant jumping between perspectives makes it feel like several short stories meshed together. The deaths in the book also felt abrupt and not terrible impactful (the dad dying off screen at the end litterally left me bamboozled). Finally, there's just a tad too many sexy female character descriptions for my taste, but to each their own.

Neat book, fun concept... wouldn't read again.

[Tyler · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had a decent time with this. At times the writing is pretty bad. There are also problems with the way people and society reacts to this insane scenario. How society would even function at all is confusing. There's no way civilization wouldn't instantly crumble but it pretty much goes on as normal here. And no one seems to consider that resources would run out within in days. And there's a bizarre chapter of a character killing dinosaurs that aren't attacking him, it's very gruesome and not needed at all imo. Despite those nagging issues, most of the various groups are pretty well-written with good action. I agree with many others that it seems for such a long book it's a fairly a limp ending. Some good dinosaur action and some interesting scenarios regarding space-time disruptions but having a hard time recommending this.

[Ryan Comella · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the first novel by James F. David I've read, and Im happy I found a copy at my local used bookstore.

I've always been fascinated with the Cretaceous period and this novel supplied a more than decent story to pique my interest. It was a ton of fun to read and immerse yourself in.

While there are quite a few characters, the time stamp and location indicator at the beginning of each chapter minimize confusion. The storyline was also full of action scenes and larger-than-life skirmishes.

Character development was hard to miss; for example the roles held in the Ripman/John/Cubby friendship clearly evolved over the course of the novel.

The dinos are presented in a believable way, along with the patchwork of the quilt, which really drove the story home.

[Chris Ellis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overly long and too much detail to my liking.

I Will say the author pulls no punches with his characters, human or otherwise, killing them off here and there.

Could have done without the "at sea" storyline and the NYC storyline altogether, as they did not really tie into the other threads.

I thought this was a series, but do not see a #1 next to the title, even though I know there are follow-ups.

I will not be pursuing those.

[Lindsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This apocalyptic dystopia contains dinosaurs and time travel. There are several different story lines that are followed, which all weave and cross in interesting ways. The book does have a rather abrupt conclusion. I felt like it was going on with so much detail and then suddenly it all just stopped. It was definitely worth the read.

[Scott Rossi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book in high school and it has stuck with me all these years its an actually different sort of disaster the characters are annoying at times but the story more than makes up for ittherebarevsequels which offer interesting plot progressionthis is a fun light read especially if you like dinosaurs and almost apocalyptic disasters

[William Kelly · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you can find all the segments of the old lady and her dinosaur, you'll have a great time. Probably better off as an anthology, that way you can just skip to the next story. Other than that 450 pages is too long.