Narrative Levels

Even a logically absurd time travel story can be incorporated into a coherent narrative but at the expense of ceasing to regard it as a time travel story. When Alan Moore adapted the British comic strip, Marvelman, he decreed that all earlier stories were a "parareality" program (virtual reality) designed to test the title character's responses. Absurdities were built in to test his credulity! That explained everything and freed Moore to write something new. However, we would not want Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series to become an "emulation" (virtual reality) in the future history of his Genesis.

The Time Patrol series does incorporate successive levels of understanding. At the Patrol Academy, Babylonians are given a battle-of-the-gods routine. Everard's class are given the truth, as much of it as they can take, but it is a long time before Everard learns that the Patrol guards not only against time criminals but also against temporal chaos. Even HG Wells' The Time Machine, with the Time Machine instead of timecycles and Eloi and Morlocks instead of Danellians, could be incorporated as a quantum fluctuation.