Thursday 17 January 2019

Extratemporal Initiation

There is (what seems to be) time travel in SM Stirling's The Sky-Blue Wolves. During her initiation as High Queen of Montival, Orlaith meets her dead father and her unborn daughter. Her father, in the past, not the hereafter, has not met her yet. The daughter has come into her past.

Poul Anderson's Time Patrol could do this, e.g., Manse Everard's instructors at the Academy in the Oligocene could have included his much-experienced older self whom we meet later in the series. However, by its own rules, the Patrol avoids any kind of temporal paradox as much as possible. Having escaped from the Mongols, Everard travels back in time but to rescue his colleague, Sandoval, not to help his younger self escape. The Patrol tries to preserve linear causality even though it turns out that their timeline is stitched together with extratemporal interventions like Everard's and Sandoval's own mission to prevent the Mongols from conquering North America.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Yes, I remember that bit about Orlaith meeting her deceased father and then her yet to be born daughter at the Kingmaking ceremony in THE SKY BLUE WOLVES. I admit to finding that an anticlimax, a let down. Because there were some hints in the earlier books that, for whatever reason, would not have children. So this daughter of Orlaith struck me as artistically unsatisfactory.

I also discussed at another blog that I did not think everybody in Montival would be willing to accept an illegitimate daughter of Orlaith by a foreigner as heiress to the crown. Almost certainly most in Montival would have preferred Orlaith being succeeded by a child begotten by a consort taken from within Montival. I suggested that for political reasons it would not be wise for that consort be from either the PPA or the Mackenzie clandom. I thought a consort from a well respected Bearkiller family would be acceptable to most in Montival.

Sean