2023/110: The Dechronization of Sam McGruder — George Gaylord Simpson

2023/110: The Dechronization of Sam McGruder — George Gaylord Simpson

Its teeth were six-inch daggers and gleamed white as it swung its ponderous head to face me. In a sort of hypnotic horror I thought inconsequentially, 'But your teeth should be dark brown!'. I had often seen the tyrannosaur skull in the Museum, and its teeth were deeply coloured. I had never stopped to think ... that in the living animal the teeth would be white. [p. 51]

Published posthumously, this novella is the work of renowned paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson: it comes with a preface by Arthur C Clarke and an afterword by Stephen Jay Gould (who strongly suggests that Simpson wrote this story as a riposte to those whose theories did not chime with his own).

The tale opens in the mid-22nd century, with a group of (male) scholars -- the Universal Historian, the Pragmatist, the Ethnologist, the Common Man, et cetera -- discussing whether it is ever possible to know that one is, and always will be, wholly alone. Why, yes! says the Historian, and provides the text of a testament found chiselled onto rock slabs. The author is Sam McGruder: while performing an experiment on the quantum theory of time, he accidentally sends himself 80 million years into the past with no hope of return. ( Read more... )