Screeds And Blights

Sometimes sf plots are blighted by blunders or "howlers" but I do not think that that is ever the case in the works of Poul Anderson unless anyone is able to cite an example? They must, at least, be rare. I should give examples of what I mean by blunders and this will be an opportunity to show by contrast how Anderson invariably gets it right.

Time travel non sequiturs annoy me most, e.g., a time traveler prevents his own parents from meeting, therefore he immediately ceases to exist:

in a single continuous timeline, the fact that he exists means that his parents were not prevented from meeting;

in a single discontinuous timeline, a time traveler arriving from nowhen, like a macroscopic quantum event, can prevent the man and woman who would otherwise have been his parents from meeting but there is no reason why he should then cease to exist;

in a multiple timelines scenario, the time traveler can be born in timeline 1 and prevent his own birth in timeline 2 and should continue to exist;

in no timeline can a potential person whose parents did not meet exist into adulthood, then cease to exist.

See The Logic of Time Travel, Part I.

Poul Anderson either avoids such non sequiturs completely, e.g., in There Will Be Time, or conceals them carefully, i.e., in his Time Patrol series. The classic sf howler is getting the science wrong. Examples can be cited from other authors' works.

A few posts ago, here, I referred to Edmund Cooper's Seed Of Light. I borrowed this book as well as Anderson's Guardians Of Time and Robert Heinlein's Orphans Of The Sky, from the Public Library in Penrith, Cumberland (now Cumbria) in the early 1960s. Remembering that I had appreciated Cooper's combination of interstellar travel with time travel and also motivated by nostalgia, I have ordered a copy from Amazon and have also reread Damon Knight's review in In Search Of Wonder. Knight highlights howlers that can help us to compare Cooper with Anderson.