Its extravagantly wide-eyed sense-of-wonder scarcely accords with the more dour experimental trends that reconfigured the genre over the following years. Then came ‘Edge Of Time’ which was largely well-received by reviewers at the time, but has been subsequently overlooked, and largely forgotten. There is also one earlier ‘David Grinnell’ novel – ‘Across Time’ (1957), about jealousy and revenge between two brothers, hook-lined ‘a quest in the year one-million’, a year earlier. By the early fifties he’d already published a handful of series-novels as ‘Martin Pearson’, and a couple of others under his own name. And a strangeness that would tax even the comprehension of the two ‘X-Files’ agents.Īlthough largely known as a pioneering editor, anthologist, essayist and critic, New Yorker Donald Allen Wollheim (born 1 October 1914) sporadically contributed short fiction to the pulps following his early debut with “The Man From Ariel” in ‘Wonder Stories’ (January 1934). With his objections firmly slapped down he sullenly sets out with her in his three-year-old Dodge, on their way to the back of the beyond. And he’s a writer who’s at first shocked to discover that his designated photographer is female, after all ‘it was embarrassing to send a girl unescorted with him’. Except that they’re a news team from national picture weekly ‘People’. Very much like a fifties version of Mulder and Scully, Warren Alton and Marge McElroy are despatched to investigate these strange occurrences. This is the latest in a series of bizarre visions seen in this remote rural area. But turning, the prehistoric vista has vanished. Terrified, he races his tractor back towards the house with his plough gouging an untidy zigzag furrow all the way. The dinosaurs, complete with their own slice of primeval jungle, have appeared in his back forty. Bassett is a dirt-farmer ploughing his field in upstate New York. And it explodes up from the opening line – ‘William Bassett had just returned to his tractor when the dinosaurs appeared’, before hurtling pell-mell into the breathless narrative. That he was also an inventively useful novelist is evident from this weird and unusual tale. ‘David Grinnell’ was Donald A Wollheim, the all-round SF-activist who donated his initials to found ‘DAW Books’.
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