New Release Books by Allen A Debus

During the 2010s, science fiction's immortal adversaries King Kong and Godzilla, representing our conflicts per Carl Sagan's "dream dragons" analogy, made comebacks in American cinema. The blockbuster Kaiju resurged onto the screen, depicting these protectors of an Earth plagued by mankind's hubris and folly. With Earth's future hanging in the balance, their climactic 2021 staging settled a score between the two giant monsters, resolving Toho's classic 1963 film King Kong vs. Godzilla. As formidable creatures emerging from Time's Tomb on Mother Earth, metaphorical Kong and Godzilla are considered here in light of new millennial environmentalism's stark reality. This book, nostalgic in tone, explores the meaning of Kong and Godzilla as planetary saviors--titanic protectors of a theoretical "living Earth" Gaia--defending the globe from a prehistoric plague of adversaries.

Thirty-five years in the making!! Not your usual 'dinosaur book'! A monstrously MASSIVE tome -- 47 chapters, half a dozen of which have not been previously printed!! A nostalgic romp--a tour-de-force wending through the murky annals of dinosaurian & dino-monster pop-culture, from Jules Verne through the Dinosaur Renaissance heyday! Allen A. Debus has written nine books addressing pop-cultural interest in prehistoric creatures, both real and fictional. This new selection has ten main sections addressing "Revenge of the 'Lost World' movie monsters," "Hopeful Monsters," "Apes & Godzilla," "Paleo-books," "Paleo-pioneers," "Odd Evolution," "Dinosauriana," "G-Fest Panels," "Chicagoland's Paleo-world," and" "Exo-paleontology." Topics explored include: dino-monster movies, paleo-fiction, dinosaur books, 'mad' scientists hellbent on Frankensteinian science & awful evolution, King Kong 'versus' Godzilla in film and novelizations, pioneers both of the dinosaur movie industry and in paleontology, paleoimagery & paleoart, science fictional dinosaurs, dinosaurabilia, 1990s dino-displays around Chicago, a sense of the 'apocalyptical' conveyed via paleo-sci-fi, and much more. While not 'all-encompassing, ' this new work paints broad brush strokes of the 'dinosaurs-in-popular-culture' genre (augmenting Allen's prior subject-matter writings). Most chapters were previously printed in increasingly hard-to-collect fanzines, some dating back to 1984. For those of you familiar with Allen's popular fanzine & dino-mag writings but lacking access to numerous individual publications in which many were printed originally, this new collection is a nifty way of acquiring over four dozen of his articles, gathered here and reorganized with sufficient inter-connectivity into sub-themed chapter format--'conversational' in tone.