2022 read #11: The Dechronization of Sam Magruder by George Gaylord Simpson.*

The Dechronization of Sam Magruder by George Gaylord Simpson*

104 pages

Published 1996

Read April 8

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

When I read The Evolution of Claire, I got to thinking about all the dinosaur books I had read as a tween and teen during the height of 1990s dinomania. In particular, I mused on how those books influenced my writing during those years, and how those influences persist as I near 40.

Much of my early writing centered on dinosaurs, and much of it was more or less copied from books and stories I read during those formative years. One of my very first short stories was a "sequel" to Jurassic Park. One of my earliest "original" stories borrowed heavily from Michael Bishop's short story "Herding with the Hadrosaurs." The first story I ever submitted to a sci-fi magazine was, essentially, Raptor Red fanfic.

Last year, I rediscovered a forgotten writing project: Time Castaway, a fictional LiveJournal I maintained sporadically from 2002 through 2005. It wasn't until I was writing my review for The Evolution of Claire that I connected the dots and realized that Time Castaway was my attempt to rewrite The Dechronization of Sam Magruder to my own satisfaction. I doubt I fully realized that even at the time.

Dechronization was a novella about a Cretaceous castaway that George Gaylord Simpson, renowned evolutionary biologist, wrote sometime before his death in 1984. Based on the rhythm of its language and the framing story (lifted wholesale from H. G. Wells' The Time Machine), I would hazard a guess that it was written in the 1960s. However, a snooty dismissal of the theory of endothermic dinosaurs would place it no earlier than the mid-1970s.

It was this dismissal, and Simpson's portrayal of dumb, sluggish, reptilian dinosaurs, that kept teenage me from fully embracing this book. (I was a warm-blooded dinosaur partisan, and I took that shit seriously. Whenever I read Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, with its outdated 1910s dinosaurs, I always had to chase it with a palate cleanser, like Raptor Red or Michael Crichton's The Lost World.) I wasn't permitted to get many books in those days, so I reread Dechronization at least a few times (however begrudgingly) and probably never admitted to myself that it wasn't a favorite of mine. And it's clear from Time Castaway that its influence lingered in my imagination.

Rereading it for the first time in about 25 years, I have to admit I find Dechronization a tad underwhelming. The framing device, no doubt meant as a cheeky nod to Wells, feels hokey; the dinosaur science was woefully outdated even when it was written; the story and characters are flimsy. It's doubtful that it ever would have been published if it hadn't been for the frenzy for anything Mesozoic back in the 1990s.

There is some philosophical content at its heart, however: musings on loneliness and why human beings -- aware of death -- bother to keep living. Ironically, it's apt material for the 2020s. Perhaps Dechronization, a book itself lost in time, is due for a revival.