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. He laboriously records his encounters with various dinosaurs (vivid, but now outdated) and his survival strategies. He is, of course, incredibly lonely (I note that he does not attempt to tame any of the beasts he meets: surely a small herbivore would be better than no company at all?) and frequently wonders whether it would be better to just give up. But he doesn't.
An odd little novella, probably never intended for publication: thought-provoking, nicely described (I found it easy to overlook the aspects that are now outdated) and with intriguing glimpses of the future that McGruder lost.
I have a feeling that I read this -- or at least owned it -- back in the 90s: I borrowed a scanned version from the Internet Archive.
No comments:
Post a Comment