11/15/09 - This site made its debut on November 24, 1996  13 years ago  not even a blink of an eye in prehistoric terms, but actually quite a while if we consider the tremendous growth of the internet... In 1996, two years BG  Before Google  there were quite a few search engines... but virtually no results for "Prehistoric Fiction". A few days ago, Google reported about 82,700 entries containing that phrase. (Click here to see how many there are now.) It seems that until Jean Auel came along, almost no one had noticed that there was such a thing! Indeed, it was her Clan of the Cave Bear that got my interest... and led to the creation of these pages. The Internet Archive picked up this site in 2000, so we can see how it looked 9 years ago here. Actually, pretty much the same as how it looked yesterday. But with the passage of time has come a clearer understanding of the literary position of PF, especially this year, with the publication of Nicholas Ruddick's The Fire in the Stone:

Prehistoric fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel... "The first comprehensive study of prehistoric fiction - The genre of prehistoric fiction contains a surprisingly large and diverse group of fictional works by American, British, and French writers from the late nineteenth century to the present that describe prehistoric humans. Nicholas Ruddick explains why prehistoric fiction could not come into being until after the acceptance of Charles Darwin's theories, and argues that many early prehistoric fiction works are still worth reading even though the science upon which they are based is now outdated..." (from the dustjacket) Although the homepage didn't change much, the pf situation did. Jean Auel's blockbuster "Earth's Children" series came to an end, and a new generation of pf novelists arose, marking pf as a perennial genre... This site is essentially an annotated Bibliography of Prehistoric Fiction, a catalog of published fiction with a prehistoric theme or element. Guide to the PF Bibliography There are three main views of the bibliography, English, All, and French. The default view is "All", which displays all the entries in the bibliography. "English" or "French" show only works in English or "French". The counts for each of these appear beneath the "All" link. Clicking on the count will display the Counts Page where totals for all of the combinations are shown. Each entry in the PF Bibliography is coded along three parameters: "pure" or "mixed"

"adult", "young", "juvenile"

"book", "story", "graphic" Colored symbols indicate whether the entry is pure or mixed, intendend for adult, young, or juvenile readers, whether it is a primarily a book, story, or graphic. The key to these codes, which appear before each entry is at the top of each bibliography page. For a general introduction, see the earlier version of this page, and the article Prehistoric Fiction (2000).

And here's a list of the major series novels: Prehistoric Series (ca. 2002).