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Opalescence: The Middle Miocene Play of Color
Have you an adventurous spirit? Do you remember when the earth seemed so large, beautiful and mysterious? Now travel back in time to an actual epoch, the Miocene, when the whole world was lush and rife with life. Roaring waterfalls, and bellowing elephants. Clear blue skies and clear, clean water. Rolling hills of green alive with delightful bird song. Take a hike down the magnificent, and sometimes dangerous, coast of prehistoric California with your Aelurodon friend and experience REAL life - the way it was meant to be lived!
—-
Opalescence starts out when total ecological collapse, desperation and regret have become a shocking reality. The world government, a fascist corporatocracy has ruled with an iron fist, but it’s losing its grip. Chaos is spreading, threatening the borders. The time is short. When time travel to a distant, unspoiled prehistoric past is accidentally discovered by scientists, the regime is immediately interested. Maybe this will be their way out. First, though, they decide to send scouts back to investigate.
Two people are chosen: Julie Pine, Paleontologist and Under-Curator at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, and Dietrich Jaqzen, professional survivalist, government hit-man and big game hunter. While Julie gathers information, Jaqzen’s job is to keep her safe for the 30 days the mission is to last. There's a problem though. Jaqzen is an unscrupulous rogue who has designs on Julie, a married woman, and secretly plans to live a Tarzan and Jane life with her in an earth all his own, raping and pillaging both Julie and the beautiful Miocene world. His personal hunting orgy.
Now begins the real adventure.
In the tradition of Clan of the Cave Bear and Jurassic Park, Ron Rayborne's Opalescence is an imaginary tale of a real world, the middle Miocene, 15,000,000 years ago. A time that science tells us was a real paradise, in terms of biodiversity. It was a world that very few know anything about.
“The later Tertiary mammalian fauna of the World Continent was perhaps the richest that has ever existed on the face of the earth." ~ Björn Kurtén. The Age of Mammals, (chapter) The Miocene: Epoch of Revolutions. Columbia University Press, 1971
"The familiar horses, zebras, asses and onagers that share our modern world represent but a single surviving branch on a once luxuriant equid family tree that reached its full glory during the Miocene.” Natural History 4/94. Article: The Heyday of Horses by Bruce J. Macfadden
“Looking back the Pliocene [or the timeframe within the Pliocene now called the Miocene] is something of a paradise lost, a climax of the Age of Mammals before the coming of the cold; a time when life was richer, more exuberant than ever before or after.” - The Age of Mammals, (chapter) The Pliocene: Epoch of Climax by Björn Kurtén.
“Lasting for millions of years, the mid-Miocene must have seemed a kind of endless summer” ~ Neptune’s Ark: From Ichthyosaurs to Orcas. David Rains Wallace
Come now, come visit the middle Miocene!
—-
Opalescence starts out when total ecological collapse, desperation and regret have become a shocking reality. The world government, a fascist corporatocracy has ruled with an iron fist, but it’s losing its grip. Chaos is spreading, threatening the borders. The time is short. When time travel to a distant, unspoiled prehistoric past is accidentally discovered by scientists, the regime is immediately interested. Maybe this will be their way out. First, though, they decide to send scouts back to investigate.
Two people are chosen: Julie Pine, Paleontologist and Under-Curator at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, and Dietrich Jaqzen, professional survivalist, government hit-man and big game hunter. While Julie gathers information, Jaqzen’s job is to keep her safe for the 30 days the mission is to last. There's a problem though. Jaqzen is an unscrupulous rogue who has designs on Julie, a married woman, and secretly plans to live a Tarzan and Jane life with her in an earth all his own, raping and pillaging both Julie and the beautiful Miocene world. His personal hunting orgy.
Now begins the real adventure.
In the tradition of Clan of the Cave Bear and Jurassic Park, Ron Rayborne's Opalescence is an imaginary tale of a real world, the middle Miocene, 15,000,000 years ago. A time that science tells us was a real paradise, in terms of biodiversity. It was a world that very few know anything about.
“The later Tertiary mammalian fauna of the World Continent was perhaps the richest that has ever existed on the face of the earth." ~ Björn Kurtén. The Age of Mammals, (chapter) The Miocene: Epoch of Revolutions. Columbia University Press, 1971
"The familiar horses, zebras, asses and onagers that share our modern world represent but a single surviving branch on a once luxuriant equid family tree that reached its full glory during the Miocene.” Natural History 4/94. Article: The Heyday of Horses by Bruce J. Macfadden
“Looking back the Pliocene [or the timeframe within the Pliocene now called the Miocene] is something of a paradise lost, a climax of the Age of Mammals before the coming of the cold; a time when life was richer, more exuberant than ever before or after.” - The Age of Mammals, (chapter) The Pliocene: Epoch of Climax by Björn Kurtén.
“Lasting for millions of years, the mid-Miocene must have seemed a kind of endless summer” ~ Neptune’s Ark: From Ichthyosaurs to Orcas. David Rains Wallace
Come now, come visit the middle Miocene!
- GenresTime Travel
540 pages, Paperback
First published December 30, 2013
17 people are currently reading
864 people want to read
About the author
Ron Rayborne
2 books35 followers
Opalescence is selected by Library Journal!
See https://midmiocene.wordpress.com/2015... for details.
Ron Rayborne, who lives on the beautiful central coast of California, is an avid hiker, animal lover and dreamer. His first "official" writing, an essay called The Sacred Secret: A Hiker's Meditations On Life, detailing one particularly memorable such trek, won first place in his college creative writing contest and inclusion in its publication, Word Of Mouth.
A romantic at heart, Ron often imagines the what it would have been like to live in a pristine prehistoric world. To that end he researched and wrote Opalescence.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 26, 2020
In movies, you normally get a nerd protagonist traveling through time to figure out if he can change some insignificant facet of his own life. In reality, if we ever get time travel, it will be scientists who utilize it for the purpose of saving our species from extinction, or some other worthy purpose. Yet scientists are only human. R. R. understands this, and depicts the conflicts of realistic characters in a dystopian future, marching to the beat of their drums. Is the planet doomed? If it is not already, the future this book depicts is startling for its feasibility, if not inevitable.
Opalescence is meticulously researched, that much is clear from the get-go. There is a persistent sense of dread inherent in the trajectory of human progress, and a consistent mourning for the lost potential offered by the distant past. Crushing and mutilating the Natural world in our ceaseless march forward, what humans have accomplished is surpassed only by the baffling immensity of the cosmos and time itself. In our Imperialism, we have unwittingly backed ourselves into a small corner. Enlisting the input of a team of subject matter experts, our author has compiled an impressive amount of technical expertise within the confines of his absorbing story, roping in every discipline from botany to volcanism.
In a government run by clones, scientists serve as secret operatives in a journey farther than any human has gone before. The pacing is conducive to page-turning, and the subject matter is fitting for a vivid evocation of the vanished past. Julie's intricate backstories serve as an anchor for our dangerously curious characters. The tyranny of man over the natural world is merely the prologue to an exploration of a shimmering pre-historical odyssey. The protagonist possesses an advanced knowledge of extinct fauna, and the author uses a lot of specialized vocabulary, which may lead some readers running for the dictionary. I didn't let it bother me. You don't need to understand every single scientific reference, unless you are reading this document to compose your thesis. He communicates the vast importance of the mission and provides tangible motivations for the risks involved. Reminds me of the story by Bradbury called "The Sound of Thunder."
Who would not want to leave behind a society illustrating various dimensions of anarchy, for a favorite period of prolegomenous beauty? Progress is at war with human needs and the downward spiral of genetic engineering, the conquering of unruly weather patterns, etc., incites an inherent need for an alternative comparison. While maintaining lighthearted detachment to the straightforward world-building, the author's examination of futurist theories, and conjectures of his chosen narrative destination lead to many an informative catalogue of pre-historical data, dramatized elegantly. At bottom, it contemplates how intimate is our connection with our planet. How much of a shadow is our current understanding of the world as opposed to the planet's prehistorical foundations? Grand in scope, human nature remains constant, even in various forms of survivalism, which by the way, is ecstatically detailed. One of these books could theoretically be written for every previous era in Earth's untrammeled pre-human history: Ice Age, Jurassic, etc. How tiny is our sliver of the inhospitable cosmic scale pertaining to the functioning of our lives. The immense diversity of extinct creatures to be found in his version of the Miocene illustrates that beautifully. The author takes his time to demonstrate his ideas, incorporating countless S-f tropes.
Perhaps the best reason to read Opalescence is to get a non-Hollywood survey of pre-history, without the dryness of a textbook, in the form of a well-told story, offering far more knowledge than your average Crichton novel. A fitting epitaph for a probably unreachable wilderness, of which our present is a mere echo.
Opalescence is meticulously researched, that much is clear from the get-go. There is a persistent sense of dread inherent in the trajectory of human progress, and a consistent mourning for the lost potential offered by the distant past. Crushing and mutilating the Natural world in our ceaseless march forward, what humans have accomplished is surpassed only by the baffling immensity of the cosmos and time itself. In our Imperialism, we have unwittingly backed ourselves into a small corner. Enlisting the input of a team of subject matter experts, our author has compiled an impressive amount of technical expertise within the confines of his absorbing story, roping in every discipline from botany to volcanism.
In a government run by clones, scientists serve as secret operatives in a journey farther than any human has gone before. The pacing is conducive to page-turning, and the subject matter is fitting for a vivid evocation of the vanished past. Julie's intricate backstories serve as an anchor for our dangerously curious characters. The tyranny of man over the natural world is merely the prologue to an exploration of a shimmering pre-historical odyssey. The protagonist possesses an advanced knowledge of extinct fauna, and the author uses a lot of specialized vocabulary, which may lead some readers running for the dictionary. I didn't let it bother me. You don't need to understand every single scientific reference, unless you are reading this document to compose your thesis. He communicates the vast importance of the mission and provides tangible motivations for the risks involved. Reminds me of the story by Bradbury called "The Sound of Thunder."
Who would not want to leave behind a society illustrating various dimensions of anarchy, for a favorite period of prolegomenous beauty? Progress is at war with human needs and the downward spiral of genetic engineering, the conquering of unruly weather patterns, etc., incites an inherent need for an alternative comparison. While maintaining lighthearted detachment to the straightforward world-building, the author's examination of futurist theories, and conjectures of his chosen narrative destination lead to many an informative catalogue of pre-historical data, dramatized elegantly. At bottom, it contemplates how intimate is our connection with our planet. How much of a shadow is our current understanding of the world as opposed to the planet's prehistorical foundations? Grand in scope, human nature remains constant, even in various forms of survivalism, which by the way, is ecstatically detailed. One of these books could theoretically be written for every previous era in Earth's untrammeled pre-human history: Ice Age, Jurassic, etc. How tiny is our sliver of the inhospitable cosmic scale pertaining to the functioning of our lives. The immense diversity of extinct creatures to be found in his version of the Miocene illustrates that beautifully. The author takes his time to demonstrate his ideas, incorporating countless S-f tropes.
Perhaps the best reason to read Opalescence is to get a non-Hollywood survey of pre-history, without the dryness of a textbook, in the form of a well-told story, offering far more knowledge than your average Crichton novel. A fitting epitaph for a probably unreachable wilderness, of which our present is a mere echo.
July 26, 2022
Ron writes an exciting tale that also includes a scientific and botanical component that adds to the details. I felt like I was being educated AND entertained. The story is extensive and expects the reader to delve into many time periods. To me, I enjoyed the botanical information that discusses prehistoric plant life.
July 30, 2017
I really enjoyed this book and am rating it 4.5 stars. I admire the authors dedication to detail and research, the middle miocene setting was built very well and captured my interest in this era of pre-history. The story was enjoyable and had me flipping pages wherever I could fine a spare minute. I enjoyed the characters (particularly the addition of those of the animal variety) and felt drawn in by the building plot tension. My only criticism would be around the slightly over use of references to extinct flora and fauna species. Initially, I would pause and research each reference but this quickly became tedious when presented with lists of unknown animals and plants. Some elements of the plot were also a little convenient, to the point of laugh ability, but honestly, they did not detract from my enjoyment of this book. I was slightly disappointed by the abrupt conclusion and would have liked to follow the main characters for another chapter or so. All in all I would definitely recommend this book to anyone looking for an easy and enjoyable read. I would love to read a sequel about Julie and Tom's life in the middle miocene. *I won this book from the author via good reads giveaways*
May 22, 2020
I really wanted to like this book, because I loved the idea. But honestly, I thought it was just awful. Awful dialogue, conception, science, characters. Full of ridiculous gender stereotypes and misogyny.
Here's just one example of how this book goes. Julie, the supposed brilliant scientist and secret ecolover (because to love the ecology is bad in this dystopia), is told by some guy whose name doesn't matter that they've discovered time travel and nobody can know. He of course chooses a crowded cafeteria in which to tell her this deep secret. And she starts yelling at the top of her lungs, "There's GRASS! Oh my god! There are ANIMALS! Oh my god!" (not an exact quote, but you get the idea).
It is possible that it eventually gets better, because I admit that I could not get very far into the book. But it seems pretty unlikely.
Here's just one example of how this book goes. Julie, the supposed brilliant scientist and secret ecolover (because to love the ecology is bad in this dystopia), is told by some guy whose name doesn't matter that they've discovered time travel and nobody can know. He of course chooses a crowded cafeteria in which to tell her this deep secret. And she starts yelling at the top of her lungs, "There's GRASS! Oh my god! There are ANIMALS! Oh my god!" (not an exact quote, but you get the idea).
It is possible that it eventually gets better, because I admit that I could not get very far into the book. But it seems pretty unlikely.
January 7, 2020
I really enjoyed the subject of the book. I think the only drawback is that it uses a lot of scientific names for creatures and can be a bit much sometimes.
May 18, 2020
Do you remember how the later Clan of the Cave Bear books suffered from far too much flora and fauna description?
Apparently Rayborne was a fan.
Apparently Rayborne was a fan.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews