A Red Age explores two rival dinosaur societies inheriting civilization, along with its politics, religions, propaganda, prejudices, bureaucracies, and an inherent capacity for war. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

One of the core motivations was that after growing up with things like Jurassic Park, the original Land Before Time, or even Dinotopia for people that remember it. We felt like these big landmark dinosaur-focused pieces of media just sort of disappeared from the pop culture landscape. Sure, we’ve had all sorts of sequels to Jurassic Park, but thinking about trying something with dinosaurs that no one has seen before just didn’t seem to be happening. So we decided this idea of letting the dinosaurs be these expressive anthropomorphic leading characters, but in a decidedly not-for-kids story, felt fresh, by eliminating the presence of human beings entirely and allowing the dinosaurs to completely envelop the entire narrative.

The other major piece has a lot to do with growing up in the United States in the nineteen nineties and early two thousands, with what may, by today’s standards, seem quaint but at the time felt like this absolutely extreme absurdity of a political landscape. Combining that with both of us having a big interest in ancient history and feeling a sense of deja vu between daily life and the ancient world’s conflicts, creating a story that bridged ancient and modern history sort of felt like a no-brainer. The dinosaur society is a deliberate fusion of many cultures, both still existing and long dead. All of those societies were rife with the same sort of absurdity found in today’s politics.

The dinosaurs in A Red Age aren’t simply human characters wearing prehistoric skins. You’ve constructed entire societies around them. What rules did you establish to make their civilization feel culturally distinct?

It was decided early on that there would be two big things that would set the dinosaurs apart from humanity. The first is that there are several different species of dinosaur living cooperatively in an otherwise hostile and warlike world, implying a very different evolution for their society compared to our own. Adding to this is the decision to combine concepts and bits of technology that are tied to specific clashing periods of history. Examples are the presence of halftracks and animal-drawn carts alongside more modern vehicles, the polytheistic ancient world-style religion advertised on TV, and the prominent ruins of older cultures that are as mysterious to the modern characters as they are to the audience. We’ve tried to foreshadow the idea that their civilization took a very different path from ours but found itself facing some of the same inevitable problems.

We also wanted to establish smaller differences like the fact that they don’t wear clothes like people do, and instead use jewelry to reflect things like status or rank. This preserves their image as recognizable beasts while also showing a very different attitude to the natural world they live in. Their more animalistic side comes up in the narrative, so we felt putting them in suits and ties would be too off-putting.

Propaganda appears throughout the novel in both serious and ridiculous forms. What interested you about exploring the way governments turn complicated conflicts into easily consumed stories?

It’s clear to us that Americans are bombarded with far more propaganda on a daily basis than people believed for a long time, and if you spend any real time studying propaganda, it becomes clear very quickly how ridiculous and absurd it all is. And yet it’s scary how it actually can work on people, and quite fast. Being able to explore that sort of concept inside a fictional entertainment industry is not only something fundamentally entertaining and relatable to include, but hopefully if there’s anything someone could feel they really learned from reading our book, it would be how to spot these sorts of things more easily in real life.

Which unresolved storyline from A Red Age should readers be paying especially close attention to before Part 2?

I think readers should be ready for weirder, goofier characters like Father Arval to gain more prominence as the story moves into a new phase with a heavier emphasis on themes we’ve so far only hinted at in the first book. There will be plenty of consequences for the decisions of the main cast, but even the most unexpected dinosaurs will have their part to play in the grand scheme of what is to come.

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