When Matthew Reilly was a boy he loved going to Taronga Zoo. His favourite thing to do was to catch the cable car, looking down on all the animals, the elephants, the hippopotamuses, the orang-utans, as the ride traversed the zoo. At the top end of the ride, near the main entrance, the cable car crosses the alligator exhibit and Reilly would wonder what would happen if the cable car, and the people in it,  fell into the pond.

"Zoos have always fascinated me," he says, "What child hasn't wondered what would happen if all the animals escaped from the zoo? Or what would happen if they got caught in an enclosure?"

In his latest blockbuster of a novel, The Great Zoo of China, Reilly has taken that idea, pumped it up to the extreme, and written a novel that will have his die-hard fans rejoicing. After a rather sedate The Tournament in 2013, Reilly is back with cliffhanger chapter endings, laugh-out-loud action, gung-ho characters and villains and unpredictable creatures.

"It was great fun just to do a gleeful monster movie on paper," Reilly says.

"I have always enjoyed writing about creatures and animals, that's where it all started. For love

"Of all my books, The Great Zoo of China is the most similar to Contest [the book which Reilly self-published in 1996, which kick-started his writing career]. In Contest I created the aliens from scratch, here it was the dragons and if you're going to have dragons then you get to make them as vicious and as intelligent as your imagination wants.

"When I set out to write it my goal was to make it as colossal and fun and unputdownable as I could."

It's refreshing that Reilly is afraid to use terms such as unputdownable and gleeful and colossal.

"I've been around long enough now that people who don't get into the outrageousness, the over the top stuff, they know not to buy my books anymore. We've  weeded out those people now."

Reilly said he had the idea for the zoo back in 2003 but couldn't work out where to place it.

"I didn't know who could build it, who could afford to build it, and now China, after the Beijing Olympics, building Maglev trains whenever they want, they could conceivably build this.

"At one point I thought this has to be total science fiction but in actual fact it's entirely believable that the Chinese, with enough manpower, could build something like this.

"And all the stuff at the start about the Chinese dream is true. They want to be the No. 1 country in the world but until it matches the feats of the United States, in military terms, in space, but in culture too they'll always be No. 2. Where is China's Disneyland? This thing would blow everything out of the water. Disneyland would suddenly seem very quaint compared to a dragon zoo."

Should the Chinese take this as a compliment?

"Maybe until you get to the point in the book where the Chinese decide to kill everyone to cover it up, they might not take that as a compliment," Reilly laughs. "Hopefully, the Chinese will have a sense of humour about it. Mind you I'm still not published in France!" [The French were the bad guys in some of his earlier novels.]

Reilly is happy to address the comparisons of The Great Zoo of China to Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park.

"I love Jurassic Park, I am the world's biggest Jurassic Park fan, I've even mentioned it a few times in the book," he says.

"If you're going to write a book that has gigantic creatures in some enclosed area, of course people are going to make comparisons. But I've jumped into the world of dragons and the geopolitics of China, I'd like to think I've told a totally original story."

Whether you agree with him or not, there's no doubting that, like Jurassic Park, Reilly will get you thinking about the origins of dragons, and whether or not the whole idea of such a zoo is indeed science fiction or whether, like all his best novels, there is just that element of possibility about it.

 The Great Zoo of China, by Matthew Reilly. (Macmillan, $39.99.)