The Time Patrol And The Temporal Bureau

"-All You Zombies-" by Robert Heinlein is 12 pages whereas Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series is 1200 pages. The opening story of the series was designed to have sequels whereas "-All You Zombies-" is complete in itself.

Anderson's premise is that the past can be changed, therefore a time travel organization exists to guard it. Heinlein's premise is that the past cannot be changed but a time travel organization can nevertheless do some good. It cannot prevent a war that happened but can have prevented a war that mysteriously did not happen because nuclear weapons were sabotaged.

Like Anderson's Time Patrol, Heinlein's Temporal Bureau recruits and operates secretly throughout history. Heinlein refers to pre-Christian Crete but, unlike Anderson, does not describe any past periods.

A similar story is James Blish's "Beep"/The Quincunx Of Time which ends with the recruitment of a new agent of the Service, an organization that does not travel through time but receives messages from the future, then causes future events.

The Time Patrol and the Temporal Bureau are an intriguing contrast and we would like to know more about the latter.

Continuing Comparisons

Having just compared Robert Heinlein's and Poul Anderson's future histories and multiverses, let's look again at their time travel. Whereas Heinlein presents three ingenious statements of the circular causality paradox in futuristic sf settings, Anderson presents many more statements of the two time travel paradoxes, circular causality and causality violation, not only in futuristic but also in historical settings.

Anderson's The Corridors Of Time, There Will Be Time and The Dancer From Atlantis all contain that historical dimension that is absent from Heinlein's The Door Into Summer, "By His Bootstraps" and " -All You Zombies." (The Door Into Summer hints that Leonardo da Vinci was Leonard Vincent, Time Traveler, but does not dramatize this.) Anderson's Time Patrol series not only ranges throughout history but also presents a unique and subtle perspective on causality violation whereas Heinlein's works do not address that paradox.

Thus, Heinlein and Anderson resemble Newton and Einstein: the latter incorporates the former in a wider context.