Rivers of Time

Author's Afterword

In 1954, I read a story by a colleague, telling of a hunt for dinosaurs by time machine. I had been a dinosaur buff since the First World, or Kaiserian, War, when my parents gave me a copy of the 1912 edition of The Book of Knowledge. This included a page of appallingly inaccurate and wretchedly-drawn pictures of prehistoric life: a mammoth, a mastodon, several dinosaurs, and other Mesozoic reptiles. Hooked, I read everything paleontological I could find and haunted the fourth floor of the American Museum of Natural History, at 77th Street and Central Park West, New York, where fossil skeletons were displayed.

Fate denied me the lifetime role of paleontologist; but I still thought I saw egregious scientific errors in my colleague's story. These irked me to the point of writing my own story of dinosaur hunting by time machine, "A Gun for Dinosaur," trying to show how it should be done.

Comes 1990; Bob Silverberg asked me to write a dinosaur story for his proposed anthology, published in 1991 as The Ultimate Dinosaur. Feeling that Reginald Rivers ought to have many good tales to tell besides "A Gun for Dinosaur," I wrote "Crocamander Quest" for Bob.

Then, finding myself between books, I wrote five more Reggie Rivers reminiscences. I also edited "A Gun for Dinosaur" to bring it into line with what I think I have learned in the last thirty-seven years. For instance, I assume that by the time of these tales, in the 21st century, the metric system, already in force in Reggie's native Australia, will also have been generally adopted in the backward United States.

L. Sprague de Camp

Piano, Texas

August 1991