Have you an adventurous spirit? Do you remember when the earth seemed so large, beautiful and mysterious? Now travel back in time to an actual epoch, the Miocene, when the whole world was lush and rife with life. Roaring waterfalls, and bellowing elephants. Clear blue skies and clear, clean water. Rolling hills of green alive with delightful bird song. Take a hike down the magnificent, and sometimes dangerous, coast of prehistoric California with your Aelurodon friend and experience REAL life - the way it was meant to be lived!
—-
Opalescence starts out when total ecological collapse, desperation and regret have become a shocking reality. The world government, a fascist corporatocracy has ruled with an iron fist, but it's losing its grip. Chaos is spreading, threatening the borders. The time is short. When time travel to a distant, unspoiled prehistoric past is accidentally discovered by scientists, the regime is immediately interested. Maybe this will be their way out. First, though, they decide to send scouts back to investigate.
Two people are chosen: Julie Pine, Paleontologist and Under-Curator at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, and Dietrich Jaqzen, professional survivalist, government hit-man and big game hunter. While Julie gathers information, Jaqzen's job is to keep her safe for the 30 days the mission is to last. There's a problem though. Jaqzen is an unscrupulous rogue who has designs on Julie, a married woman, and secretly plans to live a Tarzan and Jane life with her in an earth all his own, raping and pillaging both Julie and the beautiful Miocene world. His personal hunting orgy.
Now begins the real adventure.
In the tradition of Clan of the Cave Bear and Jurassic Park, Ron Rayborne's Opalescence is an imaginary tale of a real world, the middle Miocene, 15,000,000 years ago. A time that science tells us was a real paradise, in terms of biodiversity. It was a world that very few know anything about.
"The later Tertiary mammalian fauna of the World Continent was perhaps the richest that has ever existed on the face of the earth." ~ Bjorn Kurten. The Age of Mammals, (chapter) The Miocene: Epoch of Revolutions. Columbia University Press, 1971
"The familiar horses, zebras, asses and onagers that share our modern world represent but a single surviving branch on a once luxuriant equid family tree that reached its full glory during the Miocene." ~ Bruce J. Macfadden. Natural History 4/94. Article: The Heyday of Horses
"Looking back the Pliocene [or the timeframe within the Pliocene now called the Miocene] is something of a paradise lost, a climax of the Age of Mammals before the coming of the cold; a time when life was richer, more exuberant than ever before or after." ~ Bjorn Kurten. The Age of Mammals, (chapter) The Pliocene: Epoch of Climax
"Lasting for millions of years, the mid-Miocene must have seemed a kind of endless summer." ~ David Rains Wallace. Neptune's Ark: From Ichthyosaurs to Orcas
Come now, come visit the middle Miocene!
