Dinosaurs + Fantasy (ft. author Isaac Wilson)
- Juan-Pablo Pina
- May 4
- 7 min read
Howdy, and welcome back.
This is gonna be a special one since I’m joined by Isaac Wilson, author and YouTuber that you may know from his paleontology-themed channel: “The Vividen”. Recently, he published a book titled “Extinction: Obsidian Dawn”, which focuses on the Aztecs fighting a Carthaginian invasion alongside telepathically-bonded prehistoric animals. I got to interview him about creative writing, dinosaurs, and more!
(*Links to The Vividen on YouTube, Obsidian Dawn, and an audio recording of the interview will be linked at the end of this article).
Above: The cover of “Extinction: Obsidian Dawn” (illustrated by: Heiteresco)
*WARNING: THIS WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR OBSIDIAN DAWN!*
-Q: “How did you get into dinosaurs and paleontology?”
-A: “I loved dinosaurs ever since I watched Jurassic Park and The Land Before Time when I was two years old. The scene where the Sharptooth is fighting the main characters made a big impact on me. I would recreate it in the sink, filling it up with water, but I’d change it so that the Sharptooth won.”
-Q: “Where did the idea for Extinction or Obsidian Dawn come from?”
-A: “Ever since I was 12 or 13, I knew I wanted to write some kind of fantasy with dinosaurs as main characters. And I wasn’t satisfied with the options that were out there, since paleo-fantasy is very niche. I got the idea for Obsidian Dawn when I was living in Mexico City. I was taking a trip on the metro [subway], and I had an image in my head as I was standing on the platform in this huge tunnel. I wondered: ‘What would this look like if it was flooded and filled with giant Carboniferous invertebrates?’ So then I started researching and talking to the people there about the history and the culture and getting back into contact with my own Mexican roots. It took about four years of research to finish the process of the first book.”
-SIDE NOTE: As a person of Mexican heritage myself, I also ended up getting drawn back to my family history. I’d be looking up “What is -insert Aztec god here- the god of?” then I’d go down a rabbit hole and end up talking to my parents.
-Q: “Are there any deleted scenes or ideas that had to get cut or adapted in some way?”
-A: “I wouldn’t say there’s a ton of totally fleshed-out scenes that I ended up removing from the final draft of the book. I just cut down some stuff and tightened it up a little. It’s definitely very different from the first draft. The first draft actually had Camaxtli breaking up with Azucena, then ending up with somebody else he met on his travels. And he was actually the person that went to Aztlan. Yaotzl wasn’t even that much of an important figure at all in the first draft.”
-Q: “Where did the idea for the bonding gems come from?”
-A: “I feel like it’s been a part of the series for probably the last five to six years. It may have been inspired by Brandon Sanderson’s “Mistborn,” where different metals are associated with different patterns. So different gems are associated with different animals or groups of animals. And I think I wanted to tinker with the field of mineralogy and combine it with archaeology and paleontology to create something unique.”
-Q: “What kinds of animals will we be seeing in the future?”
-A: “This shouldn’t be much of a plot spoiler for future books, but we’re not just getting stuff from the Mesozoic, but the entire Phanerozoic Eon. In the second book in particular, you will see megalodon. Some important things will happen there. There’s also going to be some megaraptoran presence as well. Specifically, some giant ‘mega-theropod tier’ megeraptorans based on some fragmentary stuff from the El Molino Formation, the one called ‘El Tío.’ And one of the benefits about working in such a huge open fantasy world, especially basing it off of paleontology, is that there are always places where more species can be hiding. Especially in the ancient world, where they didn't have modern communication or satellite imaging. There's always something more to find out. And there can always be different subspecies, too. If a new study find comes out and says, ‘Oh, this dinosaur that was in Extinction actually had a totally different physical characteristic,’ I don't have to retcon anything. I can just say, ‘All right, well, now I've got a different breed of this thing.’ And that makes it really flexible and open. So I can just go forward and include whatever I want as long as it's based off of the fossil record and then just kind of adjust as needed.”
-Q: “Are you using the fantasy creative license to say that these animals are different from our known fossil species, or are you being strictly scientifically accurate?”
-A: “I’m not trying to dramatically oversize the creatures in the series, so I kind of base it on what would realistically match a bell curve in the population. I still want them to be grounded, even if they have god-given superpowers. For example, El Tío is based on footprints, which isn’t the best, but there was definitely something there.”
-Q: “Why did you decide to go with a perspective of a common soldier instead of, when you could have it be like a warrior prince in the upper echelons of society?”
-A: “This was actually another big change that happened between the first draft and the second draft. In the first draft, Camaxtli was actually the pack leader. He was in charge. Yaotzl was his second in command. He was the one calling the shots and taking all these actions. Um, and then I read two different series that completely changed my worldview on the rags-to-riches archetype: “Dune” and “Red Rising.” I’ve only read the first Dune, but it’s a masterpiece. Um, and Red Rising is absolutely amazing. It’s probably my second favorite series ever, just behind “Lord of the Rings.” Um, and seeing the way that Frank Herbert and Pierce Brown crafted these characters that well—in the case of Paul from Dune, he started out as a prince, went down to zero, and then became this false messiah figure. And then with Darrow from Red Rising, where he starts out as the lowest of the low, he’s incredibly oppressed. His whole life is basically a lie. He becomes this elite, basically god of war through the people that help him, as well as his own choices. And I thought that was really interesting. So I wanted Camaxtli to kind of mirror that—to be given a choice to become this Paul figure, this false messiah, or to become somebody more like Darrow, where he’s still making difficult choices and potentially causing a lot of harm to people but doing it for the right reasons.”
-Q: “What made you decide on having the Carthaginians be the main antagonists of the first book?”
-A: “One thing was I thought that Rome, while awesome, actually doesn’t have the dinosaurs to be a valid political force in this timeline. So with each of the civilizations that I chose, their military is chiefly based off of the animals that are actually within their geographical borders. So Rome became a non-factor, which chiefly left me asking, ‘What kind of overseas empire would have the infrastructure and the nautical knowledge to cross the ocean and have reason to?’ And the Greek city-states had the naval technology to potentially cross the ocean. They were very advanced in that regard, but they’re a lot more insular. There’s a lot of infighting between them. Carthage, however, was the main maritime power in the Mediterranean before the first Punic War, when Rome ended up taking a large part of their commerce away from them. So, in a timeline where Rome is a non-factor, Carthage ends up becoming this huge Mediterranean superpower and eating up a bunch of these smaller Phoenician city-states. So it was just kind of a natural progression of how the economy worked, how their technology worked, and just like that ‘what if?’ scenario.”
-Q: “Was there a main message or a moral that you wanted the audience to walk away with?”
-A: “I would say that probably depends on the character that you’re following because everybody has their own separate arc. I would say one of the biggest takeaways is how to handle blame and how to handle responsibility for your mistakes rather than blaming other people. Especially as we see the contrast between how Camaxtli and Azucena handle things versus how Yaotzl handles things. Yaotzl looks a lot more inward and says, ‘Why did this happen to me? Why did my friends fail me? This is their fault!’ Camaxtli and Azucena, while they’re offered a lot of the same opportunities to complain—and I don’t think anybody would blame them for complaining with the things that they’ve been through, between assassination attempts and watching their friends get massacred—rather than focus on the pity party aspect of it and becoming a fragile person, they say, ‘Okay, clearly there are things in this situation that are outside of my control and that I shouldn’t blame myself for, but I can take accountability and I can do my part to make sure this doesn’t get worse.’”
-Q: “Would you say that history, or your own personal experience, or media like Lord of the Rings was your biggest inspiration?”
-A: “For Obsidian Dawn in particular, I'd say probably history. Living in Mexico City, I was able to participate a lot more in the culture and especially the archaeology, and I was able to go back and visit a couple of times and see more of the things I didn't in my first time living there. Like getting to see Teotihuacan in person was absolutely incredible. Visiting the pyramids that they uncovered right there and just thinking, ‘These are the structures that I'm writing about, and I’m standing on top of them.’ And just living in the culture of Mexico City, especially in areas like Iztapalapa, where poverty is a little bit more of a thing, you’re very much surrounded by what people focus on when they're struggling and when life is hard. They focus on their relationships. And so incorporating the emphasis on family and the actual interactions that people were having around me and with me, I think was huge in trying to faithfully and respectfully depict the culture of Mexico.”
And that’s it!
I want to give a huge thank you to Isaac Wilson/The Vividen for saying yes to this interview, as it was super insightful and also creatively inspiring. It’s always awesome to see other people working to expand the niche topic of paleontology-fantasy, and this is one of my favorite examples!
I also want to encourage you all to go subscribe to The Vividen on YouTube, where you can also become a “channel member” and get both a cool digital badge and early access to videos at the Megatheropod tier. Below you’ll find links to both his YouTube Channel and the audio recording of our talk, as well as a place where you can buy Extinction: Obsidian Dawn!
So with that, I think I’m going to end it off here. I’ll see y’all next time.
Cue Outro…
*Copied over from my own Newsletter on Substack. "The Paleontology Author" https://substack.com/@paleoauthor
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