War and monsters: my new favourite author

If you’re looking for a good beach read this summer, look no further. A few weeks ago I was reading the blog of an American anthropologist called Gregory Cochran when I came across a reference to an author I’d never heard of: Taylor Anderson. According to Cochran, he’d written science-fiction books about an American destroyer that heads into a storm to escape a Japanese battleship during the second world war and ends up in an alternative universe.

It looks a lot like our world, except there was no massive asteroid strike 66 million years ago, which means no mass extinction event. As a result, dinosaurs still roam the Earth and the species at the top of the food chain are vicious, lizard-like creatures called the Grik that look a lot like velociraptors. When the Americans emerge on the other side of the storm, they’re immediately confronted by a sea battle between the Grik and the Lemurians, a more gentle, human-like species descended from the lemurs of Madagascar.