The Dechronization of Sam Magruder: A NovelMacmillan, 15 d’abr. 1997 - 160 pàgines This lost novella by the century's most renowned paleontologist has been called the greatest time-travel story in more than one hundred years. Vanishing from Earth on February 30, 2162, while working on a problem of quantum theory, research chronologist Sam Magruder is thrown back 80 million years in time. Endowed with the intelligence of a twenty-second-century man, Magruder struggles to survive, feeding on scrambled turtle eggs and diligently recording his observations on a stone-slab diary, even as menacing tyrannosaurus try to gnaw off his limbs. Filled with magnificent descriptions of the dinosaurs as only Simpson himself could render them, The Dechronization of Sam Magruder is not only a classic time-travel tale but a philosophical work that astutely ponders the complexities of human existence and achievement. |
Continguts
The Dechronization of Sam Magruder | xxi |
The Truth of Fiction An Exegesis of G G Simpsons Dinosaur Fantasy by Stephen Jay Gould | 105 |
A Memoir by Joan Simpson Burns | 127 |
Acknowledgments | 133 |
About the Authors | 135 |
A Note About the Dinosaur Names Used in This Book | |
Altres edicions - Mostra-ho tot
The Dechronization of Sam Magruder: A Novel George Gaylord Simpson,Joan Simpson Burns Previsualització no disponible - 1996 |
Frases i termes més freqüents
29 February AChA3 adaptation Alamosaurus animal arrow asked Black Gate brains chronologist citizenship school coelurosaurs cold-blooded colors course creature crocodile Dechronization der's dinosaurs eggs eighty million Ethnologist evolutionary exist extinction feet finally fire future George Gaylord Simpson gorgosaurs Great-grandpa gruder hadrosaurs happened human inebrione Joan Simpson Burns Jurassic knew lagoon late Cretaceous later learned least legs living looked Magruder's Narrative mammals mankind mean never night nosaurs novella paleontologists palm pass past Pentaceratops Valley perhaps pletely Pragmatist Précieux present reality reeds reptiles rocks Sam Magruder Saurier sauropod saurs science fiction scientific scientist seemed shale shore slabs slipped sort spear species Stephen Jay Gould stone story stream survival teeth theory thing thought time-slip tion trees Triceratops twenty-second century tyrannosaur Universal Historian wanted warm-blooded writing Znayet
Passatges populars
Pàgina ix - ONE cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he swept back into the past, and fell among the blooddrinking, hairy savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic times. He may even now — if I may use the phrase — be wandering on some plesiosaurushaunted Oolitic coral reef or beside the lonely saline lakes of the Triassic Age.
Pàgina xiii - Other writers have developed the theme that even if we could change individual events in the past, the inertia of history is so enormous that it would make no difference. Thus you might save Lincoln from Booth's bullet, only to have another Confederate sympathizer waiting with a bomb in the foyer. And so on. The most convincing argument against time travel is the remarkable scarcity of time travelers. However unpleasant our age may appear to the future, surely one would expect scholars and students...
Pàgina xiv - Some science-fiction writers have tried to get round this difficulty by suggesting that time is a spiral; though we may not be able to move along it, we can perhaps hop from coil to coil, visiting points so many millions of years apart that there is no danger of embarrassing collisions between cultures. Big-game hunters from the future may have wiped out the dinosaurs, but the age of Homo sapiens may lie in a blind region which they cannot reach.
Pàgina xv - No amplifier can recapture the words that you spoke a minute ago; even if it had infinite sensitivity, it would merely reproduce the random hiss of the air molecules as they collide with one another. If there is any way in which we can ever observe the past, it must depend upon technologies not only unborn but today unimagined. Yet the idea does not involve any logical contradictions or scientific absurdities, and in view of what has already happened in archaeological research, only a very foolish...
Pàgina xii - To change the past involves so many paradoxes and contradictions that we are, surely, justified in regarding it as impossible. The classic argument against time travel is that it would allow a man to go back into the past and to kill one of his direct ancestors, thus making himself— and probably a considerable fraction of the human race— nonexistent. Some ingenious writers (notably Robert Heinlein and Fritz Leiber) have accepted this challenge and said, in effect: "Very well— suppose such paradoxes...
Pàgina xvi - ... can detect the incredibly faint traces left upon objects by their past history. No one can yet say how far such techniques may be extended. There may be a sense in which all events leave some mark upon the universe, at a level not yet reached by our instruments. (But possibly, under very abnormal circumstances, by our senses: Is this the explanation of ghosts?) The time may come when we can read such marks, now as invisible to us as the plain signs of a trail to an Indian scout or an aborigine...
Referències a aquest llibre
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