Chaim and Yael Zorach's children will join the Time Patrol. Manse Everard reflects:
"If not...could you stand it, watching them grow old, suffer the horrors that will come, finally die, while you are still young of body." (p. 247)
The phrase that attracts my attention here is "...the horrors that will come..." Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series was published from 1955 to 1995, this instalment in 1983. Anderson avoided describing any near future events and this paid off. The series has not become dated by specifying any "horrors" that have not come to pass, e.g., in the 1990's or in the early twenty-first century - but it was a safe bet that there would be horrors. In 2025, we have experienced and are still experiencing them. Anderson was able to leave it vague and yet get it right. The Time Patrol could still be part of our timeline - and yet no, it could not, because, in the Patrol's timeline, Sherlock Holmes was a real person! Also maybe Cyrus the Great was not really a Zoroastrian? Changes in historical understanding can date time travel fiction.
In any case, the "...horrors that will come..." is accurate.
5 comments:
Well, I wouldn't call anything that's happened since 1995 "horrors", except possibly stuff in the Sudan. Just normal history -- wars and rumors of wars and so forth.
Thank you for a different perspective!
Now, 1914-45, -that- period had horrors. And the 1950's through the 1970's in China. Mao killed somewhere between 30 and 60 million in the Great Leap; I've talked with Chinese who knew people who'd eaten their children, or traded them with other people so they could eat someone -else's- children.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, what we have been mostly seeing since 1995, in both minor and major ways, is simply how have been behaving since the Fall.
Mao! What a vile creature he was, managing to be both the Lenin and Stalin of China in one disgusting package.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Yeah, Mao was notably bad.
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