Travelling Through Time

Assessment of Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time: All the time travel paradoxes and historical periods work out fine but the recently completed rereading has increased my misgivings about what exactly goes on inside these time corridors. Why do all the travellers not meet each other every time they move up or down a corridor? This question would have to be cleared up somehow before I could be fully satisfied with this novel.

Tomorrow will be another day not much different from today but it would become an exotic other country if someone were able to travel to and through it and then return to today:

"'The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow.'"

-HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1973), 4, p. 24.

The Time Traveller's dinner guests will live through that tomorrow just like everyone else but for now it is a mysterious place that he has visited and that they cannot, yet.

Poul Anderson's "Flight to Forever" was published in 1950 but its time travellers set off from 1973. Martin Saunders and Sam Hull have been to 1953 and to 1993 and have seen the house standing but no one home either time. Saunders says that the jaunts are dull but from 1973 to 1993 and back again is anything but dull. I would be relieved to find no one home on a first expedition. Just being there then - in 2045 in our case - would be more than enough. When the story opens, they are about to embark for 2073 which will prove to be not dull but deadly.

Tomorrow will be another coach trip, not as far as London but taking up much of the day.