'Poor Little Warrior' – Brian Aldiss

Dinosaurs are cool and that's pretty much the long and short of it. They are the closest we'll ever get to all those other cool monsters that live in fantasy fiction, but nowhere else, and we still managed to miss out on them by several million years. Although maybe that's not such a bad thing...

In the meantime though, we have more dinosaur movies than we know what to do with, we've got dinosaur comic books (check out 'Flesh' if you ever get the chance, it's great) and we have, erm... dinosaur books too?

Now, for me, the whole thing about dinosaurs is how they look when they're chasing down some dumb tourist or whatever, Brilliant on the big screen, still pretty cool in a comic book but are you going to get that visceral action in a book? I wasn't sure so when I saw a copy of Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois' 'Dinosaurs!' Anthology, I knew I had to give it a go. It was only 50p on Deptford Market (which was great for books for about a fortnight and now I haven't seen a decent one since...) so I wasn't exactly losing out. I've read a little Aldiss in my time so I thought I'd give 'Poor Little Warrior' a go first... And it was only five pages, I have said that reading didn't come easy to me over the last couple of weeks...

'Poor Little Warrior' takes the well worn trope of time travelling tourism and then, well... proceeds to make the story about our brave hunter rather than the dinosaur he's hunting. Not a great start then for people like me who want to read a 'dinosaur story' but if you stick with it... Well, it's still not much of a dinosaur story (our Brontosaurus doesn't last long) but there's more to it than you might think. What we have here is a cautionary tale of 'man vs beast' that's all the more eye catching as this isn't your average safari. Aldiss gives us a little look into the mind of a hunter wrestling with his own inadequacy and about to learn the hard way that even a dead dinosaur can prove to be dangerous. It's like a quick look at how far man has come in terms of his ability to hunt. Hundreds of years of progress has made the hunt easier but has also proved to be a real disconnect in terms of why we hunted in the first place and the lessons that we originally learned. The size of what Claude is hunting just makes those lessons all the more obvious. Is there a lesson there for the reader? I'd like to think so, we're not getting a lot of dinosaur action here so there has to be something else instead.

I'm not going to lie, I feel like I'm the only person who could pick up a dinosaur anthology and go to the only story with hardly any dinosaur in it at all. What 'Poor Little Warrior' does do well though is to highlight the inadequacy of the huntsman while giving us a nice little jumpscare right at the very end. That'll teach our hunter a lesson, except that it won't because he's dead.

'Poor Little Warrior' isn't a bad tale then but I'll be honest, I wanted more dinosaurs. That's me though and not the story, it's not a bad tale so long as you're happy to be taken in a slightly different direction than you originally planned...