Saturday 9 June 2018

Reinterpreting Future History

Poul Anderson did not connect the Time Patrol with the Technic History but did connect There Will Be Time with the Maurai History. Time Patrolmen could have changed the Technic History whereas Havig's group cannot change the Maurai History although they can change the significance of particular events.

The Maurai History exists in:

three short stories;
one long novel, Orion Shall Rise;
some passages of There Will Be Time.

History can be "changed" not only, in some timelines, by time travelers but also by new interpretations:

"Those who remember other tales from the world of the Maurai will perhaps notice what appear to be inconsistencies with them in this book. However, consistency is not an either-or matter. New data and insights often cause us to revise our ideas about the past and even the present. Surely the future is not exempt."
-Poul Anderson, Orion Shall Rise (London, 1988), AUTHOR'S NOTE, p. vii.

Logical consistency is an either-or matter but historical interpretation is not. The Foreword of There Will Be Time tells us that the author, not his informant, called those folk the Maurai.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I'm very glad Poul Anderson did not try to connect his Time Patrol stories with the Technich Civilization series. Because it would have been so easy to make a hopeless muddle of both series by trying to link them up.

I think Anderson managed to pull off linking THERE WILL BE TIME with the Maurai series. At least partly because the Maurai stories were few enough that Anderson managed managed to link them up.

Sean