Manse Everard tells Wanda Tamberly that the advantages of Time Patrol membership include:
"' - centuries of lifespan, and never sick a single day.'" (p. 100)
Maybe this made us think that Everard had claimed that he had already lived for several centuries? When do Everard, Tamberly, the Denisons, the Farnesses and others go after they have phased out of their lives in the twentieth or early twenty-first centuries? It would make sense to relocate to the period after the discovery of time travel and also after the introduction of antisenescence treatment. Then it would be possible to live openly for several centuries. Meanwhile, Stephen and Helen Tamberly might spend several decades in the Spanish colonial period.
Wanda says:
"'It's hard getting in touch with my feelings - Psychobabble!" (p. 98)
She is sufficiently younger than Everard to talk about getting in touch with her feelings but remains sufficiently an Anderson character to discount such talk as "psychobabble." I once heard a guy in Lancaster telling some acquaintances, "My ex-wife was coming out with all this psychobabble!" I say now that I would never speak of an ex-wife with such disrespect.
Everard reflects:
"We guard what is. We may not ask whether it should be. We had best not ask what 'is' means." (p. 99)
What does it mean? Energy and particles come from vacuum. We come from nothing, pass through being and return to nothing: children of the void. Potential people who are not conceived remain nothing. Does this seem odd? How else could it be?
10 comments:
Given the Patrol's resources, relocating in the same general milieu with new identities (and new appearances, if necessary) would be easy enough.
It's remarked fairly often in the Patrol stories that different eras are usually uncomfortably weird and alien to live in.
In THE SADNESS OF ODIN THE GOTH, the agent and his wife relocate to NY in the 1930's from their original home in the 1950's.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Hmmmm, not a bad variant on Anderson's title for the story!
And the 1930's in New York City would not be too terribly alien from the same city of the 1950's.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: I would miss the internet. You would not believe the time and effort it saves on research.
Of course, a Time Patrol agent would have a private far-future computer setup, disguised, the way Everard is shown as having in his New York apartment.
The real problem with living in a very distant era backwards or forwards would be the people; their attitudes, habits of thought and mind, moral reflexes, etc. Like the culture shock of moving to a very different country now, only much worse.
(From SM Stirling.)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, what you said about how the Internet has made research so much easier, in many ways, than formerly. Before about 1990 such research often had to be done by either going in person to libraries and archives, or by correspondence.
Yes, where possible, Time Patrol agents would have disguised computers/databases. Perhaps set up in ways where only they could use it.
Culture shock? I recall Jack Havig discussing in THERE WILL BE TIME how strange and ALIEN Elizabethan England felt to him!
Ad astra! Sean
Travelling from a suburb into London by bus and train, I asked a companion a question. He answered it from his phone before we had completed the journey.
I read a time travel/alternate history book once, whose point of departure was a time traveller losing a book in England in the 1830's. It was an illustrated children's book -- perhaps aimed at teenagers -- called GREAT INVENTIONS OF THE 19TH CENTURY... which fell into the hands of a clever young Mancunian engineer with entrepreneurial ambitions. And oh, the time traveller was surprised 'when' he returned to the 21st!
(From SM Stirling.)
Sean: in many ways, 1922 would be alien -- in some ways, the more so because of some familiar elements among the weirdness.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: One of those questions we might have gone to the library and use the ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA to answer?
Mr. Your first comment after Paul's: sort of reminds me of De Camp's LEST DARKNESS FALL. What Martin Padway started in the sixth century WOULD make the seventh century very different!
Yes, if I could travel backwards in time to 1922 I am sure many things would look very strange to me. And others would be familiar.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Exactly.
Paul.
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