Title: Lost in Time: Trapped in a Prehistoric World
Author: Dan Arthur Busby
Publisher: Golden Ink Media Services
ISBN: 978-1-952982-77-4
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 91
Reviewed by: Arthur Thares
Hollywood Book Reviews
From the title and overall premise of this book, you would think it is just another run-of-the-mill time travel story, and while it has elements of recycled time travel plots, everything is not as it seems. There are some age-old time travel tropes in this story, but some new twists make it different, for better.
In a not-too-distant future, time travel has been discovered in the most surprising of ways. The government has a monopoly on the technology and uses it to send prisoners back in time to the age of the dinosaurs, so they are not a burden on the system. The story begins when the main character is sent back to the Cretaceous period for a crime he didn’t commit. He quickly hooks up with more victims of this malicious punishment, and they team up to survive the savage Cretaceous.
What the judge who sentences our main character doesn’t know is that he is trained in time machine technology, and all of the materials he needs for a time machine are conveniently available in the Cretaceous. The group manages to fend off blood-thirsty dinosaurs while creating their time machine. Eventually, they find themselves hurtling through time, picking up friends along the way. The story has a pretty satisfying ending despite being a reasonably generic time travel story.
The author manages to tell an exciting story in a genre that is very popular. I enjoyed the way he made futuristic technology accessible in the past by inventing a new molecule. The story is written clearly, and there isn’t a lot of filler; in fact, it could have done with a little more filler. I found myself wishing that this book would have been stretched into a series so more time could be spent in different periods interacting with the characters. Still, you get to know the characters enough to root for them in every dangerous situation in which they find themselves.
Lost in Time: Trapped in a Prehistoric World is worth reading if only for author Dan Arthur Busby’s imaginative take on the process of time travel. If you love time travel and the idea of what it would be like to suddenly find yourself in the land of the dinosaurs, you will enjoy this book. The ending satisfies in several ways, and I hope that Mr. Busby continues to create imaginative stories like this one; so readers can enjoy these characters and future plot developments.