George Gaylord Simpson, The Dechronization of Sam Magruder, (St. Martin's Press, New York, 1996). 160 pp. $17.95. ISBN 0-312-13963-2.
George Gaylord Simpson (1902-1984) was one of the most respected and prolific vertebrate paleontologist of our century, with a long and distinguished career at the American Museum of Natural History and at Columbia and Harvard Universities. Ten years after his death, his daughter, Joan Simpson Burns, discovered the manuscript of a novella presenting through science fiction Simpson's speculations about time travel, validity of scientific theories, and many other insights into a great scientific mind. Probably written in the 1970s, Simpson apparently never intended to publish it. But with the assistance of Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Jay Gould, Ms. Burns has made available a wonderful work for whiling away a few hours.
Simpson has created the story of Samuel TM12SC48 Magruder AChA3*, a scientist whose investigations into the nature of time resulted in his sudden disappearance from his laboratory of 2162, and emergence into the late Cretaceous world of 80 million years before his birth. Magruder carved an account of his adventures on eight stone slabs, then deposited them in a swamp, in the slim chance that they would be incorporated into the resulting shale and discovered at some future point by people able to decipher them.
In a bow toward H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, Simpson utilizes discussions between the "Universal Historian," who had Magruder's slabs entrusted for the transcription, and the "Pragmatist," the "Ethnologist," the "Common Man," and the narrator, presenting both an excellent time-travel story and thou ghtful speculations concerning dinosaurs (about which Simpson probably knew more than almost anyone else in his time), evolution, and human nature. He focuses much around the question that opens the story: "What would you do, what could you do if you knew you were going to be utterly alone for the rest of your life?"
Joan Simpson Burns obtained the manuscript following the death in 1994 of her stepmother, Anne Roe. A distinguished psychologist on her own merits, she and Simpson were the first married couple to hold full professorships at Harvard. Ms. Burns prevailed on Arthur Clarke to write an introduction on "The Exploration of Time." She also was able to get Simpson's one-time student and now professor of biology/geology/history of science at Harvard, Stephen Jay Gould, to write an afterword on "The Truth of Fiction: An Exegesis of G. G. Simpson's Dinosaur Fantasy."
The combination of good science, riveting science fiction, two erudite essays, and a fascinating glimpse at the life of one of America's great paleontologists is a mixture not to be ignored. It is strongly recommended for summertime, weekend, intersession, or bedtime reading.
- Michael J. Passow A reminiscence about George Gaylord Simpson
Around 1968, I was on a bus heading to the Jersey shore for a weekend with my aunt and uncle. The man who sat next to me noticed my Columbia T-shirt, and told me that he had attended Columbia during the depression years. When I mentioned I was a geology major, his eyes lit up and he told me he had taken introductory geology with Professor Simpson.
"Everybody knew Dr. Simpson was the world's leading expert on fossil horses," he said. "So we expected to hear something about horses at any moment. But when he came to the end of the first lecture, not one word. So when Professor Simpson asked if there were any questions, the class clown piped up, 'Who's going to win at Aqueduct?'"
"Without a pause, Dr. Simpson rattled off something that sounded like the name of a horse, and everyone dutifully laughed. Imagine our surprise the next day when someone told us that such a horse had, indeed, won! After that, every lecture had to end with a "best pick." Most of us didn't have enough spare money to bet, but those who did wound up the semester several hundred dollars richer!"
Just my luck to have a professor for the same course who was the world's leading expert on fossil snails!
M. J. P.
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