Review of Victor Monnin’s “Reading Omens in the Escape of Genetically Engineered Dinosaurs, 1970s-1990s.”

Victor Monnin examines the ways in which literature and films recycle the central narrative of genetically engineered dinosaurs escaping from their enclosure and putting the human species at risk.His article looks at a series of literary and cinematic texts that are set in the period between the 1970s and the 1990s, at a time when western societies were beginning to apprehend the consequences of genetic engineering on the social order.While Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993) immediately comes to mind at the thought of resurrected dinosaurs, Monnin shows that there exists a series of lesser-known texts that precede the blockbuster film and that similarly engage with the idea of genetically engineered dinosaurs on the loose.Monnin's article, therefore, demonstrates how stories of genetically engineered dinosaurs respond to, and are symptomatic of the social anxieties concerning genetic technologies between 1970 -1990 through its examination of the following popular texts: Robert Olsen's short story, Paleontology: An Experimental Science (1974); Robert Silverberg's short story, Our Lady of the Sauropods (1980); Harry Adam Knight's novel, Carnosaur (1984) and its filmic version by Adam Simons (produced a few weeks ahead of Spielberg's film in 1993); Michael Crichton's novel Jurassic Park (1990) and its 1993 cinematic adaptation by Steven Spielberg.Although significant textual space is not devoted to the close reading of these primary texts, Monnin zooms in on the continuities and variations in their exploration of the core theme of genetically engineered dinosaurs resisting containment.All of these popular texts converge in their shared attempt to illuminate the dangerous consequences of manipulating DNA.Even so, they each reflect the social anxieties of their time and, hence, communicate a different notion of what is being put at risk.In this way, the dinosaurs' escape operates "as metaphors for a wide variety of contemporaneous concerns related to unchecked capitalism, changes in gender norms, ecological threats, and reproductive technologies" (37).Monnin conducts extensive research on the context of each text in an effort to bring into conversation the natural sciences and literature.He brings up the ways in which the implications of the dinosaurs' escape from human control in the selected texts is tied to fears concerning the collapse of the social and natural order as well as to the contemporary production of scientific knowledge about genetic engineering and dinosaurs.In this way, Monnin's work not only shows the ways in which genetic engineering and its consequences disrupt the nature/culture and nature/technology binaries that undergird a western understanding of human-animal relations, but also significantly blurs the gap between the natural sciences and the humanities.Monnin asks the important question of why dinosaurs, rather than another extinct animal, are cast in all these popular texts.However, his work remains largely contained within its exclusive focus on dinosaurs.It does not actively articulate the ways in which these texts can further an understanding of the ethical dilemmas faced by current de-extinction projects.Monnin responds to his question concerning the portrayal of dinosaurs in those texts by positing that dinosaurs were already a cultural icon ahead of the 1970 -1990 period and, thus, proved a more lucrative candidate for novelists and filmmakers.Also, the production of scientific knowledge about genetic