This sepia-toned photograph was taken the identical 12 months Simpson died, in 1984. It reveals him standing in a book-lined workplace trying barely down into the viewer, as if we’re an fascinating specimen momentarily distracting him from the guide he’s holding, Fossils and the Historical past of Life. Simpson’s bald head and thick van dyke facial hair are putting, however I’m drawn to his outfit. He’s carrying a multicolor polo, tucked in, with the buttons all the way in which up. He’s additionally sporting a bolo tie. You meet every kind in academia, and though I can not articulate why, these sartorial decisions give me a robust impression of how Simpson maneuvered a dialog. After accumulating the face, I started studying Simpson’s work and the commentaries it impressed. However earlier than bringing that to bear on my exegesis of The Dechronization of Sam Magruder, it’s price sketching the plot.
Sam Magruder is a chronologist (time scientist) dwelling within the twenty second century. He invents a tool that dramatically slows down one’s expertise of time. He makes use of this system to decelerate time a lot that he experiences time’s discrete nature and slips between time quanta. Having turn out to be unstuck in time, Magruder is equally more likely to reappear at any second up to now 10 billion years. Touring ahead in time is not possible as a result of the longer term doesn’t exist. Solely the previous is actual. Magruder, whom each Stephen Jay Gould and Simpson’s daughter, Joan Burns, establish as a stand-in for Simpson himself, occurs to reappear in modern-day New Mexico throughout the Cretaceous. The novel is epistolary within the sense that the story is meant to have been carved onto stone tablets by Magruder after he traveled to the previous. The reader is launched to those lately unearthed tablets through a bunch of future teachers who’ve begun holding common conferences to learn and talk about Magruder’s story.
As a novelist, Simpson is usually heavy handed. As an illustration, when describing Magruder’s use of the decelerate system, he appears fairly taken with the picture of a person disappearing in order that solely his garments are left piled on the ground. To make sure the reader totally appreciates this visible gag, he repeats the identical description with minor alterations thrice in a single web page. In one other try at humor, Simpson spends a stunning period of time exhibiting how consuming alcohol (which has turn out to be an archaic drug sooner or later) makes the teachers pronounce the letter “s” like “sh”. In his evaluation of the novel, Gould (119) singles this bit out as “fairly crude” and provides the commentary that he “by no means noticed [Simpson] relaxed or joyful” with out alcohol and tobacco. Science fiction writers have a nasty popularity for taking nice care to elucidate new concepts or applied sciences whereas neglecting the interpersonal relations that drive literary narratives ahead. The Dechronization of Sam Magruder typically realizes this stereotype. The entire absence of girls is emblematic of this imbalance. Though the existence of girls is alluded to, the story solely considerations males with terminal levels.
But behind all of the clumsiness, there are hints of refined world-building. The exposition is sprinkled with particulars that paint an image of future society as concurrently multicultural, pluralistic, strictly regimented, and preoccupied with racial ancestry. Individuals converse “Interlingual Swahili” and have names like “Kto”, “Fatima”, “Hsuan”, and “Mary”. However there additionally appears to be a second naming system. Underneath a newspaper image of Magruder, it reads “Samuel TM12SC48 Magruder AChA3*” (Simpson 1997, 18). Future teachers interpret this photograph and title within the following means (Simpson ibid):
No epicanthus. Considerably flattened nostril. Maybe the nostril and the hair mirrored the one-fifth mongoloid ancestry indicated by the middle-name symbols, however the caucasoid had predominated. Ancestors technicians and scientists. High marks in citizenship college and in chronologists’ skilled college. Embellished thrice for achievement. Fairly a boy!
“Citizenship colleges” are referenced two extra occasions. First, when Magruder remembers his adopted daughter:
I used to be very keen on her and I believe she appreciated me all proper, however she is not going to miss me a lot, and admittedly I don’t miss her as a lot as I do most of my pals. She was away at citizenship colleges more often than not, in fact, and I used to be somebody to pay the payments and to indulge her when she got here residence on holidays. When the time-slip got here, she was sufficiently old to have an interest largely in boys and had no time for me. That’s regular, and it was regular, too, for my pursuits to maneuver away from her as she developed away from me.
The second reference is an offhand comment close to the tip, the place Magruder claims to have realized “a good smattering of genetics and of sensible animal breeding” whereas in citizenship college.
For being so ham-fisted in his supply of sure scenes, Simpson is conspicuously silent about how he or any of his characters really feel about this courageous new world. Simpson criticized fascism in different writing, and particularly opposed organic arguments that framed fascism as the following step in human evolution (Nyhart and Lidgard 2021). Within the context of his evolutionary theorizing, Simpson’s critique of fascism was associated to his elevation of the person because the locus of evolutionary occasions (Simpson 1941; Nyhart and Lidgard 2021). Naming individuals through a standardized notation system that communicates instructional achievement, occupation, and racial ancestry feels vaguely fascist and anti-individual, so I are likely to interpret Simpson’s portrayal of the longer term as dystopian. No matter is happening in Simpson’s future, ancestry, lineage, heritable traits, standardization, and training are overarching themes.