Matthew Reilly: The Great Zoo of China

In recent years, I have been a big fan of the Christopher Nolan–directed Batman movies. What I think those movies do very well is make something that is inherently unbelievable—a guy chasing criminals dressed as a bat—into something entirely believable. They do this, I think, by making it absolutely and utterly real. Batman’s armour is a military suit; his cape is an electrostatic membrane; his Batmobile is a prototype military vehicle. If I was going to write about dragons, then I had to make them real in a similar, believable way. I had to come up with a credible reason for their existence and also for the rarity of their appearances throughout history.

I decided to focus on the idea that myths are often based on reality or real events. So I asked: what if all those myths of giant dragons were based on actual creatures that had shown themselves only rarely.

This idea percolated in my mind for a long time (to give you an idea, back in 2003, I had only just finished writing Scarecrow ). I remember doing a lot of research into dragons and dragon myths while holidaying in Queenstown, New Zealand, in 2010. It rained non-stop for the entire week I was there, so, with nothing else to do, I just curled up beside the fire for the week and researched dragons.

It was here that I realised that the myth of the dragon is indeed a global one… and yet there was no mass communication system in the ancient world. How could the features of dragons be so consistent all around the ancient world, from Australia to Meso-America to Greece and Norway, when there was no way to send information around that ancient world? My (fictional) answer was that every now and then a single dragon would rise from its nest and check to see if the atmosphere was suitable for the rest of its brethren to emerge.

What made you decide to set the zoo in China?

When I first had the idea of a zoo filled with dragons in 2003, I asked myself: who would build such a thing? More than that, I asked, who could afford to build such a thing? The zoo I had in mind would be simply enormous, a valley the size of Manhattan Island. Back in 2003 I had no answer to that. The idea was too fanciful, too fantastical. I couldn’t think of a company or a country that could build such a place, let alone have a good reason to do so.

And so I let the idea rest in the back of my mind.

However, as the first decade of the 21st century passed by, I noticed something: the rise of China. I watched the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing: the unforgettable Opening Ceremony and the huge stadiums that the Chinese built. I watched documentaries about how China constructed the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam and her ability to build entire cities within months. I read about the many kilometres of maglev tracks China has laid. I read about its multi-trillion-dollar national savings and the massive debt America owes it. (I also, it should be said, read up about China’s suppression of protests and dissent during the 2008 Olympics, and the way it arrests known agitators every year in early June, just before the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.)

And suddenly, in 2012, I realised that I now had a nation that could realistically build my dragon zoo: modern China . (The fact that China also had a long history of dragon myths helped, too.) My fanciful and fantastical notion of a dragon zoo was no longer fanciful and fantastical. I had just had to wait a decade until the world caught up with my idea!

Having China build my dragon zoo also solved another problem I had: comparisons with Jurassic Park .

As anyone who has attended one of my talks will tell you, my favourite novel of all time is Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. In fact, it is one of the novels that made me want to be a novelist. I loved the originality of it, the pace of it, and the fact it was a gleeful monster movie on paper.

I was very aware that my story of a dragon zoo would inevitably draw comparisons with the dinosaur theme park of Jurassic Park . So I endeavoured from the outset to make The Great Zoo of China as different from Jurassic Park as I could. Jurassic Park sees several experts brought in by the park’s investors to assess the dinosaur park when it encounters difficulties. My novel would be about a press tour: any new world-class zoo needs to announce itself to the world, so I figured its owners would bring in some bigshot journalists to have an early look at it. Given the nature of the new zoo, they would have to be journalists with instant credibility, from trusted newspapers and journals like The New York Times and National Geographic .

But the main difference between my novel and Jurassic Park would be China. The theme park in Jurassic Park was an out-and-out capitalist venture. With their Great Dragon Zoo, China is attempting to do something else entirely: it is trying to usurp the United States as the pre-eminent country on Earth. To do that, it needs to top America’s cultural superiority: basically, it needs to come up with an attraction that trumps Disneyland. To me, this is actually a real issue today and it gave the story a geopolitical reality that I wanted.

Tell us about making the dragons real.

There is a quote early in the novel that I really like: the one that says fairytales sanitise things that were, in reality, not very pleasant at all. Knights have been immortalised as chivalrous heroes in shining armour, when in truth they were swarthy brutes and rapists. I simply adapted this idea to my dragons.

My dragons would not be towering, high-crested and proud-chested beasts. They would be lean and mean, low and calculating. They would be monsters of a bygone era. To make these inherently unreal animals real, I gave them capabilities that only exist in the real world.

In their tempers and capabilities, my dragons mostly resemble large crocodiles. This is because (a) crocodiles scare the crap out of me, and (b) I see modern crocodiles as a species of dinosaur that survived the meteor impact 65 million years ago and still live among us. If you have ever seen a big croc up close, you will agree that they are literally monsters of another time.

I gave my dragons the best predatory senses and skills of the most dangerous apex predators in the animal kingdom: crocs, alligators, snakes, hawks, big cats and sharks. All the capabilities you read about in the book come from real predators. Hawks really do see in the ultraviolet spectrum. Snakes can detect changes in air pressure. Sharks really can sense the increased beating of a wounded animal’s heart (seriously, whoa). Crocs really do have remarkable memories for hunting. Alligators really do communicate with subsonic grunts and vibrating their bodies. Chimps really do make specific vocalisations regarding leopards. By grounding my dragons’ abilities in reality, I felt I made them more believable.

For they have to be believable. A monster movie is only as good as the monster in it. And as anyone who has read my very first novel, Contest , will know, I love a good monster movie. Creating fun and scary monsters is half the fun. By creating the different sizes and species of dragon—a process that took months—I got to populate my monster-movie-on-paper with some seriously kick-ass monsters. (Even the names of the different dragons will sound oddly familiar to many readers. Yellowjackets are a kind of wasp. Red-bellied black snakes are found in Australia. Eastern greys are a variety of kangaroo. By using names that readers are vaguely familiar with, I was trying to make my dragons seem more real. I also just loved the imagery of a red-bellied black dragon! It’s instantly scary.)

The Great Zoo of Chinaalso sees your first (adult) female lead character! How did you come up with the amazing CJ Cameron?