A throwaway scene in the novel involves a distant world in which a family of creatures much like plant-eating dinosaurs are gamboling.In good time I got back the manuscript. With it came a long editorial letter which, among other things, directed me to remove that scene. I don’t have the letter any more because in the aftermath—which involved me getting the wonderful Harriet McDougal back as editor—Tom Doherty, Tor’s publisher, suggested that I burn it. I haven’t forgotten the editor’s language after 30 years, though (and I’ll probably be able to quote it on my deathbed): “Dinosaurs are reptiles, and reptiles do not nurture their young.”She was wrong about reptiles also (some of them do nurture their young), but the important point of this statement is that in 1985, an educated (if remarkably arrogant) person could believe that dinosaurs were reptiles and behaved like lizards, not mammals.2When Tor published three of the stories in the present collection in 1982 (as Time Safari), I wrote an afterword arguing forcefully for the New Dinosaur which the stories describe:warm-blooded, quick-moving, intelligent creatures.
