Cover image of "Memory Reborn," a novel about how dinosaurs survived extinction

Get ready for the action and a fast-shifting setting. A CIA black site in Colorado. A sprawling cattle ranch in Oregon. A paleontology dig in northeastern Thailand. And a secret Chinese scientific laboratory underground in Yunnan Province. The book opens there in China as “Distant Rain Sweeping Towards Home as Night Falls woke yet again in her bare, odorless cell, wishing she could die.” Now, you won’t have a clue what’s going on here unless you know what transpired in the first two books in David Walton’s immensely clever Living Memory trilogy. Memory Reborn is the third and final volume, and a fitting close to a thought-provoking story about how dinosaurs survived extinction. So, a few words of explanation are in order.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Two dinosaurs survived extinction

Distant Rain Sweeping Towards Home as Night Falls is a dinosaur. Distant Rain, for short. A maniraptor female, to be precise. She’s one of two maniraptors who survived the Cretaceous-Tertiary Mass Extinction event, or K-T event, when an asteroid strike (and possibly volcanic eruptions as well) wiped out the dinosaurs. But in David Walton’s fevered imagination, two of them survived.

Two maniraptors emerged alive in the 21st century because they were scientists in an advanced civilization built on a sophisticated knowledge of chemistry and genetics. And Distant Rain’s colleague, Easy Prey, a male known to humans as Charlie, had been an astronomer who predicted the meteor strike. Communicating by the sense of smell, they and a small number of others fashioned a cavern deep in the Earth where they could hibernate. And there, in Thailand, paleontologists had awakened them. Now, Distant Rain is a captive of the Chinese, and Charlie is in Colorado, imprisoned by the Americans. They’re in captivity because both superpowers have discovered that one of the odors the dinosaurs can emit at will is designed to pacify and control their prey. And both the US and China look on the chemical that produces it as a superweapon.

Now you’ve got a sense of what’s going on. Of course, it’s much more complicated than this.

Memory Reborn (Living Memory #3 of 3) by David Walton (2023) 286 pages ★★★★☆

Artist's rendering of a Maniraptor like the two in this novel about how dinosaurs survived extinction
Artist’s rendering of a Maniraptor like Prey and Rain in the novel. Image: Fossil Wiki

Familiar characters enliven the evolving story

Distant Rain and Easy Prey join a handful of familiar human characters in Walton’s ongoing story.

  • The Shannon sisters, Samira and Beth, both prominent paleontologists. Beth is short and blonde, Samira tall and dark, having been adopted as a child in Ethiopia by their missionary parents.
  • Kit, a Thai paleontologist with an unpronounceable surname, who has become Minister of Science and Technology in a Thai government led by Queen Mai Sirindhorn.
  • And Colonel Zhanwei of the People’s Liberation Army, who leads his nation’s strike force in Thailand to secure the superweapon.

Now, yet another scientist joins the cast of characters: Dr. Li Ling, a zoologist researching salamander communication by smell, who is ordered to the lab in Yunnan Province where Distant Rain is imprisoned. There, she is assigned to assist other scientists who are extracting the powerful chemical from the dinosaur by force.

Up to a point, the Living Memory trilogy is based on known science. After all, Walton writes hard science fiction. But of course the survival of two dinosaurs after sixty-six million years in hibernation is impossible. The only excuse for building a trilogy around this fantasy is to tell an enjoyable story. And Memory Reborn is a lot of fun.

About the author

Photo of David Walton, author of this novel about how dinosaurs survived extinction
David Walton. Image: author’s website

Philadephia-based science fiction and fantasy author David Walton has published ten novels and a slew of short stories to date. The three books of the Living Memory trilogy are his most recent efforts. On his author website, Walton notes that he is an engineering fellow Lockheed Martin. He describes himself as a Christian and adds that he lives near Philadelphia with his wife and eight children. He also notes prominently that he is a Christian, and in Memory Reborn he introduces Compassion International, a faith-based child sponsorship organization, as a major factor in the story. He’s clearly a big supporter.

See my reviews of the first two books in this trilogy: Living Memory (These dinosaurs left something behind) and Deadly Memory (Paleontologists unearth a deadly weapon—and a killer virus).

I’ve also reviewed two other books by David Walton: Terminal Mind (Breakthroughs in brain science propel this science fiction thriller) and The Genius Plague (The greatest threat to humanity is . . . a mushroom?).

David Walton is one of 10 new science fiction authors worth reading now.

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