In Good Company

At the same time as I was struggling with my Naboo-rebranding dilemma, I was eagerly awaiting the arrival of copies of the 20^th Anniversary Editions of James Gurney’s Dinotopia books. (Yes, I know these editions came out like, six or seven years ago…suffice to say that I’m thrifty, a laggard in more than just technology, and always wary of reissues with extra features…I tend to wait until I’m sure that the new edition will be worth it, find the best possible (usually secondhand) price, and then gift the old edition to a niece or nephew).
It was a particularly ironic bit of serendipity, since, as I touched on earlier, Naboo’s capitol Theed was maybe/maybe not influenced by Dinotopia’s Waterfall City.

Imagine my surprise then, when I began reading the added Foreword to the second volume, The World Beneath, and came across the following passage:
“One day Jim [Gurney] called with a unique invitation. The National Geographic Society had invited him to give a lecture at their national headquarters in Washington, DC. Jim came up with a brilliant idea for the presentation. He would appear not as the author, but as Arthur Denison, the lead character! I invented a new character, Dr. Keith Graham, Minister of Dinosaur Science and Veterinary Medicine. Linda Deck and Ralph Chapman also invented characters for their presentation. We rented costumes and then gave a short talk about our life growing up in Dinotopia. The auditorium was filled to capacity with parents and children. After the talks, we handed out “travel visas” to the children so they could visit Dinotopia. Jim had designed and made all of them by himself. Their realistic appearance was close to a real diplomatic visa. The looks in the eyes of the children, who believed Dinotopia was real, was priceless.”
Dr. M. K. Brett-Surman, foreword to Dinotopia: The World Beneath (vi).

A wide grin spread across my face. ‘Haha!’ I thought. ‘Not only am I not the first person to pair education and fictional reenacting….but the other person to do it was none other than James Gurney!’
(It’s doubly nice to see that he also gets extra audience engagement by passing out facsimiles of in-universe documents:

As we both come from an anthropological/archeological background (see his wonderful work for National Geographic in the mid-late ‘80s), Gurney’s works have been highly inspirational and influential to my development in terms of how I approach fictional and historical settings. My compatriots in the MeRS have been throwing the idea around of contacting James to see what his interpretation of Middle-earth might look like… Now I’m wondering what he could do if given a single GFFA planet’s culture to flesh out!