Book Review: "We are not meat" (Lost in Time book one)

"We are not meat" by Steve Higgs and Hunter Hemsworth Higgs is the first in the "Lost in Time" trilogy of novels about time travel to the age of the dinosaurs.

Bestselling author Steve Higgs started writing in when he was still a captain in the British army: his first novel, "Paranormal Nonsense" was about an agency exposing fake ghosts and imaginary monsters. It's basically "Scooby Doo" set in Kent and without any talking dogs, and went on to spawn more than 20 novels in that series along plus several spin-off series.

The "Lost in time" trilogy came from an idea from Steve's son Hunter which followed an event at the Natural History Museum in London.

The premise for the story is that a private company run by a self-made billionaire, Leonard Willis, has discovered the secret of Time Travel. For those who are familiar with both the book and film versions of "Jurassic Park," Leonard Willis, is so evil that he makes Michael Crichton's original version of John Hammond, the ruthless businessmen behind Jurassic Park in the novel, look like the kindly and ethical version of the character played by Richard Attenborough in the first two Spielberg films.

So having discovered time travel, what does Willis do with it? Offer very rich tourists a chance to go back in time - for a million pounds per ticket -  and see dinosaurs. He also sets up "Meat Company," a company which sells dinosaur meat to gourmet restaurants.

The serious danger that mucking about with the past in this way might destroy our timeline, potentially affecting all life on the planet, and could possibly mean that the entire human race is erased from history as though it never existed, is briefly mentioned but not really addressed in this book. It is given rather more attention in a later book in the trilogy.

It's not a spoiler, as the reader is informed in the prologue at the beginning of the book, to  write here that other people who are desperate to learn the secret of Time Travel have hired a platoon of mercenaries under a man called Grant Blake, a cashiered former SAS major, to steal the secret of time travel.

The central characters of the book are Hudson, a retired army veteran (also from the SAS) and his dinosaur mad son Rapscallion (by name and by nature) for whose ninth birthday the boy's uncle, a Meat Company employee, arranges a highly unofficial visit to the Cretaceous as a special treat.

Unfortunately they manage to arrive at about the same time that Blake and his mercenaries, in their attempt to steal the technology, also arrive at Meat Company's "Time Base Alpha" and trigger a series of terrifying events ...  

This is basically the same sort of Dino Disaster story as Jurassic Park except that instead of using bioengineering to recreate dinosaurs in our time the company behind the project has used time travel to visit them in theirs.

Will you find any serious discussion of the ethical or practical issues around time travel, let alone how it might work, in this book? No.

Will you find any highly original ideas or any brilliantly depicted characters? No.

Will you find a certain amount of amusing dialogue and a fairly entertaining story? Yes.

If I were rating this on a star system of one to five stars where one star is dire and five stars is brilliant, I would give "We are not meat" perhaps three and a half stars. 

This is not the best time travel adventure series I have ever read: it is not remotely in the same league as Steve White's "Jason Thanou" series or Will Hubbell's books "Cretaceous Sea" and "Sea of Time" for instance. 

However, it is very far indeed from being the worst.

You can order this book from Amazon at

We Are Not Meat: Lost in Time Book 1 by Steve Higgs and Hunter Hemsworth Higs: Amazon.co.uk.

Professor River Song