The Dechronization of Sam Magruder: A Novel - Hardcover

George Gaylord Simpson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312139632 ISBN 13: 9780312139636

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1996

Synopsis

The Dechronization of Sam Magruder is one of the stranger works of fiction that has appeared in recent years. Its author, George Gaylord Simpson, was widely regarded as the greatest paleontologist of the twentieth century. He died in 1984, but the manuscript of this intriguing novella about a twenty-second-century scientist was not found by his daughter until ten years after his death.
Did Simpson want this time-travel story eventually to be published? Was Sam Magruder Simpson's alter ego, the scientist of his imagination who was able to observe dinosaurs the way they really were?
No one will ever be sure of these answers, but what we do know is that Sam Magruder, a fortyish research chronologist, vanished on February 30, 2162, as he was working on a problem of quantum theory. Thrown back in time eighty million years to the prehistoric Jurassic era, Magruder, endowed with the intelligence of a modern man, discovers that he is the only human being in a valley filled with dinosaurs. Magruder, inventive and resourceful, keeps a stone-slab diary and struggles mightily to survive by feeding on lizards and scrambled turtle eggs, even as menacing tyrannosaurs try to gnaw off his limbs.

About this title

About the Author:

George Gaylord Simpson was a professor at Harvard University.

From Publishers Weekly:

This intelligent, if conventional time-travel yarn, which was found by the daughter of the eminent paleontologist Simpson (d. 1984), shows some of the crusty wit of his idiosyncratic autobiography, Concessions to the Improbable. Simpson tells the tale of Sam Magruder, a 22nd-century scientist who slips back to the late Cretaceous period. In this "Crusoe of the Cretaceous," as Clarke dubs it in his appreciative introduction, Magruder's struggle to maintain his mental composure in utter isolation is as important as his struggle for survival among the saurians. In the manner of H.G. Wells's Time Machine, the tale is framed by present-day (in this case, 22nd-century) interlocutors, who try to make sense of Magruder's record, which has been found by a geologist. Simpson uses the story to advance his preferred hypotheses about dinosaurs, most notably that they were cold-blooded and slow (a vision that has come under increasing attack since the 1960s, according to Gould's afterword), but he doesn't sacrifice storytelling to pedantry. When Magruder is shocked at the gleaming white teeth of a T-rex?he'd previously known only fossil-brown?the thought is shocking to the reader, too. The end, which involves an epiphany Sam has when trapping small, shrew-like mammals for their fur, is comic and oddly moving at once: he realizes, with a sense of both awe and the ridiculous, that the creature is his "Great-grandpa."
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0312139632
• ISBN 13: 9780312139636
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 136
• Editor: Joan Simpson Burns