Artorius reflects:
"Time travel does odd things to your mind, too. Thank God it only happened to me once! If it was routine I'd go bughouse." (p. 402)
That has to be read as a comment on sf works where time travel does become routine and some of those are bughouse although not any of the ones that are discussed and recommended on this blog.
James Blish thought that no author had yet done justice to the concept. He envisaged a novel about an entire society based on a finite-spinning-universe theory which apparently would (have) allow(ed) for time travel.
However, just a simple time travel premise like a small group being displaced to a specific date has endless possibilities. SM Stirling shows us what other authors had not thought of. Poul Anderson would have welcomed this antithesis to the Time Patrol project of holding time and history to a single course. And how will this new series develop?
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Also, if Herr Doktor Fuchs and his team could work out both a theory of time travel and make that an engineering practicality with an actual temporal displacement machine that implies it might be done again in the future. And was repeated by the Maoist Chinese at the same time Artorius was shanghaied to AD 165.
Yes, Anderson would have loved to read Stirling's T0 TURN THE TIDE and THE WINDS OF FATE.
Ad astra! Sean
Note that physicists say time travel is mathematically identical to FTL.
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