Friday 26 April 2024

Poul Anderson's Time Travel

We would like to see uniform editions of Poul Anderson's time travel works presented as a single discrete sub-category of his complete works. Thus, the Time Patrol series would be reissued in either two or four volumes. A revised and completed Past Times collection would still of course culminate in "Flight to Forever." There Will Be Time should be presented as the culminating volume of a trilogy beginning with the collected Maurai short stories and continuing with the long novel, Orion Shall Rise. Of these three volumes, only There Will Be Time deals with time travel but it nevertheless belongs with the Maurai History since, in this case, Anderson merged time travel with future history. That leaves The Corridors Of Time and The Dancer From Atlantis as two one-off time travel novels although I also link the latter to Conan The Rebel and The Golden Slave because these are Anderson's three novels set B.C. Anderson's time travel works considered as a whole are one massive successor to H.G. Wells' contrastingly brief The Time Machine.

We would also like to see long and detailed screen and graphic adaptations of Anderson's time travel works. A single actor would be able to play Brann in The Corridors Of Time and Merau Varagan in the Time Patrol series - as well as the Master in the Doctor Who series. In particular, the many future periods visited in "Flight to Forever" deserve different and special visual treatment. There is the climax of the restoration of the Galactic Empire followed by several even remoter future periods leading to the dissolution and reconfiguration of the universe, then a journey forward through Earth's past and back to this time traveller's starting point. These concepts and images deserve to transcend their original formulations as prose fiction.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I do regret, however, the error Anderson made in the Maurai short stories when he assumed metals would be rare and prohibitively costly. Albeit he did walk that a bit in ORION SHALL RISE. And avoided it entirely in THE WINTER OF THE WORLD.

Ad astra! Sean