Patience And Wisdom?

You know I keep saying how much better Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization is than Isaac Asimov's REF (Robots, Empire and Foundation) future history? Well, I am not going to do that again but there is an exactly parallel case: how much better Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series is than Fritz Leiber's Change War series - with the one proviso that I have only ever tracked down two installments of the latter, The Big Time and "Try To Change The Past." (I have lent my recently acquired time travel anthology so do not have it for reference but I suspect that that is the title of the short story.)

The premise common to both series is organizations of time travelers in a timeline that resists change but is nevertheless changeable. Anyone familiar with the Time Patrol can guess what a "Change War" might be. But there the resemblance ends. Leiber merely informs us that Spiders and Snakes wage war throughout space and time whereas Anderson shows us Time Patrolmen fighting Neldorians and Exaltationists in concrete historical periods.

Spiders and Snakes do not recruit physically. Instead, they extract an unexplained invisible "Doppleganger" from the world-line of a recruit shortly before his death. How a Doppleganger interacts with matter seems contrived and arbitrary. Also, even when a murder weapon has been removed, the murderess thinks that she is raising and firing a gun and the victim's body acquires a bullet wound in accordance with Leibniz's Theory of Pre-established Harmony:

• Pre-established harmony.^[43] "[T]he appropriate nature of each substance brings it about that what happens to one corresponds to what happens to all the others, without, however, their acting upon one another directly." (Discourse on Metaphysics, XIV) A dropped glass shatters because it "knows" it has hit the ground, and not because the impact with the ground "compels" the glass to split.

I don't think so.

Spiders and Snakes want to prevent each other from ever having existed. Why? Is either side any better than the other? What shape will history be left in if either succeeds? Surely, by eliminating the enemy, the victorious side would also eliminate itself?

The Big Time seems to reach the conclusion that change is natural and that the best way to respond to it is to combine the legendary patience of a spider with the scriptural wisdom of a serpent so is the entire series an extended metaphor for life?