At The Academy

While contemplating temporal paradoxes and historical periods, we must also remember Poul Anderson's descriptions of nature, including pre-human nature:

"Light streamed golden across a prairie reaching beyond sight. Wildflower-starred, grass rippled and, she knew, rustled under the wind. In places, a grove or a thicket interrupted immensity, and in the distance trees lined a great brown river. She knew also how its water and its mud surged with life, larvae, insects, fish, frogs, snakes, waterfowl, herds of rooting merycoidodon like giant hogs or small slender hippopotami. Wings filled heaven." (The Shield Of Time, pp. 129-130)

(I remember "High is heaven and holy" in another Anderson series.)

The following paragraph describes the Time Patrol Academy on an elevation reinforced against floods. Gardens, lawns, bowers and low subtly curved buildings of changing colors have stood for millennia and will be carefully demolished fifty millennia hence. Next, of course, we read that Cadet Wanda Tamberly breathes mild, rich air with odors of growth, soil and herbs - so nothing is missing from an Andersonian appreciation of natural beauty.

We read of the "...great brown river..." and the low, curved buildings of shifting colors when Everard was at the Academy (Time Patrol, p. 6) and Havig's main base in another time travel scenario is similar although in the Pleistocene:

"It stood on a wooded hill, and through the valley below ran a mighty river which...shone in the sunlight like bronze."
-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), p. 157.

The Patrol Academy is in the Oligocene and the Patrol also has a lodge in the Pleistocene.

Anderson Versus Verne

Jules Verne is tedious! I might not finish Hector Servadac/Off On A Comet although I do want to check what he writes about Jupiter and Saturn. Even when his characters traverse the Solar System, Verne is mainly interested in their national peculiarities, writes very insensitively about a Jewish character and spends far too long, in the pages of a novel, telling us what is already known about comets.

I found one very minor and accidental connection with Poul Anderson. One of Verne's comical British characters refers to the Battle of Hastings as the unfortunate affair at Senlac. Since the fictional American town of Senlac is the birthplace of Anderson's character, Jack Havig, I googled Hastings and Senlac and learned, which I probably have heard before, that a hill called Senlac was a site in the Battle.

In literary terms, Anderson is a successor of Wells far more than of Verne. For one thing, both wrote English. Also, both wrote fiction from their characters' viewpoints, not semi-documentary.

(Note to Ace Books: this is not Verne's only interplanetary novel.)