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| The Dechronisation of Sam Magruder,
George Gaylord Simpson |
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| Books,
Matt Fresco,
27 January 2001 |
Rating: F4
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The Dechronisation of Sam Magruder is a rare and unusual book and the story that surrounds its discovery and publication is in every way as entertaining and fascinating an insight into the life and work of its author as this short novella is itself. G G Simpson was a brilliant biologist and prolific writer. His contribution to our understanding of evolution was seismic and his work as a palaeontologist at Harvard is without rival. The book contains in-jokes and send ups of his profession
His daughter discovered the book by accident in amongst his personal papers many years after his death in 1984. It is unknown when or even why it was written. But certainly it was never intended for publication. It is a curious novella that contains in-jokes and insights to the academic world of GG Simpson.
Essentially it is HG Wells' Time Machine rewritten. The Universal Historian tells the story to the Pragmatist, the Ethnologist and the Common Man mimicking HG Well's style and structure. But rather than rolling time forward contrary to Einstein's Relativity Theory, G G Simpson takes his hero back through a well argued time slip to the end of the dinosaurs reign.
His mechanism for returning in time reopens the debate started by the Greeks on how time moves. For Simpson it moves in short bursts, as a series of points rather than a smooth flux. It moves like individual movie frames. We cannot perceive where one frame ends and another begins.
Magruder is quite marooned and left to live the rest of his life battling dinosaurs and wondering why he is bothering to survive. The feeling of loneliness is all pervading and we do ask ourselves why he continues to battle through every grim day. GG Simpson was a small, strange man. He had a determination and belief in himself that was only surpassed by his loneliness and fear that his contribution to science would be forgotten.
The book was probably written for his own amusement. Magruder arrives naked in his new world some 80 million years ago and fails to recognise a dinosaur because the colours are not what he expects. Before the end the time traveller becomes convinced that even if he returns to his present day his first hand observations of dinosaurs will add almost nothing to their study.
This is a rich text. On first reading there is the captivating story but on a second look the story is rich with references to evolutionary theory. On his second day in the Jurassic wonderland Magruder is chased by a tyrannosaurus and then bitten by a crocodile. This gives him time to reflect on why one species should become extinct and the other should continue so successfully as to be unchanged to this day.
St. Martin's Press
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