Relearning History

SM Stirling, Conquistador (New York, 2004).

Adrienne explains to Tom and Roy:

Alexander the Great (see image) did not die in 323 BC but lived for another forty years;

the Greeks assimilated the Jews, thus preventing Christianity;

Zoroastrianism died out;

some Scandinavians visited the American continents briefly but no one else;

Eurasia still has medieval technology;

Alexander is still worshiped as a son of Zeus.

Comments
Adrienne: "'The details don't matter.'" (p. 258)
me: They do! (But not from her practical pov.)

Adrienne: "'...our best guess is that the Industrial Revolution needed the equivalent of a toss coming up heads a thousand times in a row.'" (p. 259)
me: Is our history really that improbable?

Appendix Three: "Alexander the Great died in August of 280 B.C.E., in the summer capital of Ecbatanta..." (p. 589)
me: Is this the same as the Ecbatana visited by Time Patrolmen Manse Everard and Keith Denison?
me: When did Alexander die in Poul Anderson's "Eutopia"? Reading Stirling's alternative histories has persuaded me to reread Anderson's Old Phoenix stories and now his "Eutopia."

Crossovers

(Custer's Last Stand.)

As far as I can see at present, the Draka anthology, Drakas!, incorporates "crossovers," or meetings, between the Draka and five individual characters who had some, real or fictional, existence before the anthology was published:

General Custer;
Gordon of Khartoum;
Anson MacDonald/Robert Heinlein;
Anne Marie Talbott writes a story in which she meets two Draka (I think);
John Barnes' cross-time traveler, Mark Strang.

That is quite a list. There are at least two ways that Poul Anderson's characters could have encountered the Draka:

Manse Everard of the Time Patrol, finding himself in the Domination timeline, would travel pastward to delete that timeline;

Draka cross-time explorers might have found their way into the Old Phoenix but would then learn that they were allowed to recuperate there briefly but not to gain any knowledge that they could use to further their cause back in their own timeline.

Strong Central Characters

Poul Anderson wrote strong central characters who make a difference in their respective historical milieus:

Manse Everard defends the Danellian timeline;
Dominic Flandry defends the Terran Empire and makes what provision he can for the Long Night;
Gunnhild defends her and Eirik Blood-ax's bloodline.

In this sequence, there is a progressive narrowing of focus from an entire history to a single Empire to a single family. Constrained by Viking views and values, Gunnhild learns what she can of shamanism and Christendom but, of course, lacks the scientific knowledge of either the Danellian future or the Terran Empire.

Let us consider three other strong central characters:

Gratillonius defends the Roman Empire and tries to preserve civilization after Imperial withdrawal;
Nicholas van Rijn founds Solar Spice & Liquor and enriches himself;
David Falkayn makes a career in Solar Spice & Liquor but also founds both Supermetals and Avalon.

Thus, Falkayn builds something for others instead of merely defending a status quo.

The six characters represent three timelines:

the Danellians;
Technic Civilization;
a fantasy history of Europe.

"I only work here."

"'Have you gotten any word since your first report?'
"'Yes. I have not passed it on, because it is very incomplete. Better to assemble a coherent picture first, I assume.' As a matter of fact, it was not, but Everard didn't press the point."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), p. 327.

This quotation highlights a few points. First, much of what the Time Patrol does is Intelligence work. Patrolmen gather intelligence not about other countries but about other times or timelines but it is Intelligence work nevertheless. Secondly, work in any large organization requires continual cooperation, coordination and checking of what colleagues are doing, especially when they have moved away from their own original area of expertise. A historian waits for a coherent picture whereas an Intelligence officer welcomes every single datum as soon as he can get it.

After all the training and induction, we still have finite, fallible human beings working with or around but hopefully not against each other. How much bad practice is out there? Think of some of the teachers you endured. I think about some of the teaching and other services that I provided...

A third point is that we can know that someone is wrong but also that it would not be helpful to challenge him about it right away. In a staff meeting, my boss answered a question by saying, "Paul's dealing with that." I wasn't but it would not have been right to contradict him in front of others.

Finally, Everard has the best attitude to work that I have come across:

"The universe isn't for the likes of me to understand. I only work here." (p. 261)

Britannia

Yet again, our Latin class reads Julius Caesar's account of his invasion of Britannia. When the soldiers hesitate to jump from the ships into deep water while weighed down by heavy armor, the standard bearer gives a lead. Shouting that he at least will do his duty to the republic and to his commander (imperator, later to mean "Emperor"), he jumps down and runs among the enemy. The men have no choice but to follow since loss of their standard is the greatest disgrace for any legion. Here is a hero worthy of later works of fiction.

Caesar's account prefigures:

Poul and Karen Anderson's Gratillonius, a British Roman Centurion;
Time Patrolman Manse Everard's mission to post-Roman Britain;
the immortal Hanno's encounter with the post-Roman warlord Artorius, who resisted English invaders;
the history of Britain with its later imperial role;
Manuel Argos' founding of the Terran Empire, based on the Roman Empire.

Caesar came before all this so it is a worthwhile exercise to try to decipher his text!

Cartels And Chaos

The Polesotechnic League
Nicholas van Rijn's protege, David Falkayn, is a series character in his own right, with one story set before he works for van Rijn's company, another before he meets van Rijn, four about the trader team led by Falkayn and a grand conclusion.

The Terran Empire
Dominic Flandry acquires a protege, his own daughter, Diana Crowfeather, who stars in what I call a "proto-series," i.e., a single work that was potentially the opening installment of a new series.

The Time Patrol
Manse Everard's protege, Wanda Tamberly, becomes a new continuing character in The Shield Of Time.

League, Empire and Patrol each confront their external opponents, most notably:

the Merseian Roidhunate aims to destroy the Terran Empire;
Neldorians and Exaltationists try to change the history guarded by the Time Patrol.

However, civilizations face not only external threats to their continued existence but also internal causes of their own decline. Chunderban Desai tells Dominic Flandry that:

"'...wrong decisions bring breakdown...Technic civilization started on that road when the Polesotechnic League changed from a mutual-aid organization of free entrepreneurs to a set of cartels. Tonight we are far along the way.'"
-Poul Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (New York, 2012), pp. 388-389.

We last saw van Rijn and Falkayn trying to hold the League together for a while after the fatal wound inflicted by cartelization. What had seemed to be an external threat had really been engineered by one cartel.

The most fundamental threat to the Patrol is internal not merely to the time-traveling civilization but to the cosmos: quantum chaos changes history unpredictably. We last see Everard and Wanda shortly after they have counteracted one accidental quirk in the temporal flux.

Authentic Characters

Poul Anderson's leading characters are genuinely and authentically different from each other. If there are scales for hedonism and flamboyance, then Nicholas van Rijn is at the very top of both scales and Manse Everard is at the other ends with Dominic Flandry somewhere between but nearer to van Rijn.

It makes more sense to compare Everard with Flandry because van Rijn is an independent operator whereas Flandry works for a government and Everard works for - can we call the Danellians an inter-temporal government? Through their agency, the Time Patrol, they impose laws on time travelers and they are also the covert power behind all temporal governments for as long as those governments hold power. Always on the side of history, they must protect Hitler until 1945.

Traveling through space, not time, Flandry preserves the Terran Empire for as long as possible, not until any already known date. The worst thing that we see him do is his participation in the forcible annexation of Brae. Doing what he does, Everard has worked out how to cope with guilt. He has no qualms about killing rapists but tries to minimize harm to bystanders. His job is harder than Flandry's. Consider some of the regimes that he must protect.

Poul Anderson's Two Main Series

Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, complete in one omnibus collection and one long novel, begins when Manson Everard is recruited into the Time Patrol in New York, 1955, and ends when Unattached Agent Everard, having just begun a relationship with Patrol Specialist Wanda Tamberly in San Francisco, 1990, has also just completed a mission to Paris, 1307. However, Wanda trained at the Patrol Academy in 31, 275, 389 BC. Further, a million years after the twentieth century, humanity will have evolved into the Danellians who will found the Time Patrol when time travel is discovered in 19352 AD. In the early twenty fourth century, an Unattached agent will live on Venus and a Patrol physician will work on the Moon. Time criminals are sent to an exile planet. Thus, the series presents a vast panorama of space and time although mainly of time.

Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, complete in seven omnibus collections, begins with the exploration of the Saturnian system about 2055 AD and ends with the exploration of the Cloud Universe star cluster in 7100, when mankind has spread through three spiral arms. An earlier star-faring race became extinct in the galactic past, leaving a legacy of ruins with inscriptions and of small organisms that are telepathic parasites. Thus, the History presents a vast panorama of space and time but mainly of space.

Lorenzo

In 1138alpha, Manse Everard, as Sir Manfred von Einbeck of Saxony, comes to Anagni to meet Lorenzo de Conti, the hero of the battle of Rignano. Everard will learn that Lorenzo's world line interacts with many others and therefore has the potential to generate more than one divergent timeline.

Rereading this passage, we find that Anderson's earliest description of Lorenzo had prepared us for this character's larger than life role:

"...vividness. Even quietly seated, the man somehow blazed. He rose from his bench as a panther might. Expression went across his face like sun-flickers on water where a breeze blew." (The Shield Of Time, pp. 329-330)

Changeable patterns on the surface of the sea had already been used as a metaphor for variable reality:

"For reality is conditional. It is like a wave pattern on a sea. Let the waves - the probability-waves of ultimate underlying quantum chaos - change their rhythm, and abruptly that tracery of ripples and foam-swirls will be gone, transformed into another." (Time Patrol, p. 671)

It is as if even Lorenzo's face expresses his historically pivotal role. 

Levels Of Complexity

A descriptive paragraph mentions foothills and forest and ends:

"Southward the Caucasus walled heaven with snowpeaks."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), p. 277.

I have returned to this earlier episode of Keith Denison's adventures both for the beauty of Poul Anderson's prose and for the appropriateness of the attached image - which is in fact of the Caucasus.

Any blog reader who has been following Denison's adventures through my summaries might prefer to learn what happens next in Paris rather than to revisit the Caucasus. However, Anderson does not give us a direct account of Denison's captivity under Albin. The author juggles with three characters:

Denison, as we have seen, is captured in the alpha timeline;
Wanda Tamberly remains free in that timeline and decides to explore it before returning downtime;
Manse Everard, back in 18,244 BC, is informed of the alpha timeline and marshals his resources to restore the timeline guarded by the Patrol.

All this is far more sophisticated than "Delenda Est," the original culmination of the Time Patrol series. All that happened there was that Everard and van Sarawak entered a divergent timeline and had some adventures there/then before returning downtime to rectify the situation. And they succeeded on the first attempt, which Everard does not do in The Shield Of Time. "Deleting" the alpha timeline generates a beta timeline...

Wells' The Time Machine, Anderson's The Guardians Of Time and Anderson's The Shield Of Time are three successive levels of complexity in time travel fiction.

The Hero Of The Time Patrol

Never was Manse Everard of the Time Patrol such a hero as in Part Two of The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991). In Bactria in 209 BC, four city guards come to arrest Meander the Illyrian/Everard. In real life, that would mean the end of Everard's mission. In fiction, we at least expect our hero to be detained for a while. Not Everard. Thinking "He who hesitates is bossed..." (p. 59), Everard knocks over the lamp, fights his way past the four guards, then runs out onto the street where the map imprinted on his brain tells him how to evade pursuit.

He spies on the Exaltationists, gaining invaluable intelligence, escapes from the city and arrives as a pilgrim in a temple that is to be used as a meeting place by two Exaltationists, one accompanied by six armed guards, the other wearing the medallion that is Everard's own stolen Patrol communicator. Killing the medallion-wearing Exaltationist and injuring the other, Everard says into the communicator in Temporal, "'Unattached Everard. Come immediately. Combat.'" (p. 113) while the guards run towards him. Then it is all over.

The Patrol arrives in force, stunning everyone around Everard. Then Everard leads some of the other agents to the lair of the two remaining Exaltationists sixty seconds earlier, before those Exaltationists' detectors can warn them of the arrival of the timecycles that rescued Everard. Thus all four Exaltationists are killed or apprehended. And this has all been accomplished when Everard speaks into the communicator. A very economical solution to a major problem.

Multiple Timelines Or A Mutable Timeline?

Merau Varagan, the main villain of the Time Patrol series, has two conversations with Manse Everard and one with Stephen Tamberly. Thus, Varagan appears three times, as does his clone mate, Raor. This is way more than any other villain in the series. Everard's thoughts after his second conversation with Varagan inspired the following observations.

I have been referring to the Time Patrol universe in two ways, either as a single mutable timeline or as a succession of timelines. This is because I regard these as two ways of saying the same thing. For the sake of the argument, let us say that, on the one hand, there is only one timeline but that, on the other hand, this single timeline changes. What can this mean?

The timeline exists only because of change. If the universe had remained in its initial state and had not changed to another state, then there would have been no time and therefore no timeline. Time is nothing more than the relationship between a state changed from and a state changed to just as space is the relationships between material objects. Spatial relationships change - objects move - so there is a temporal relationship between a number of spatial relationships. The timeline is simply the sum total of the successive cosmic states and of the temporal relationships between them. Temporal relationships are "before" and "after" or "earlier" and "later." So what would it mean for the timeline itself to change?

Let us use Arabic numerals to denote one set of cosmic states and lower case Roman numerals to denote a second such set. If s = state, then s1 is one state of the universe and the sequence s1, s2, s3 is a state of the timeline. Thus, the timeline, or one section of it, might change from the sequence s1, s2, s3 to the sequence si, sii, siii. In this case, the Roman numerals sequence comes after, and is later than, the Arabic sequence. There is a temporal (or hyper-temporal?) relationship between the two states of the timeline. A second temporal dimension would contain successive states of the timeline just as the familiar temporal dimension contains successive states of the universe.

However, I can see only a terminological difference between the phrase, "successive states of the timeline," and the shorter phrase, "successive timelines." A time traveler who remembers the s1, s2, s3 sequence but who now experiences the si, sii, siii sequence could say either that the timeline has changed or that he is now in another timeline but, on my hypothesis, these would be two ways of saying the same thing.

At each moment of the first temporal dimension, there is a universe with three spatial dimensions. At each moment of the second temporal dimension, there is a continuum with one temporal and three spatial dimensions. It is confusion between the two temporal dimensions that causes confusion in discussions of time travel.

After his second conversation with Varagan, Everard thinks:

"I should've retorted, 'Suppose [Raor] succeeds. Suppose she does blot out the future. You'll be in it, remember? You'll stop ever having existed.'" (The Shield Of Time, p. 45)

No, he won't. Raor might generate a subsequent timeline such that, when discussing the events occurring along on the temporal axis of that timeline, it is true to say that Varagan has never existed along that timeline. However, that cannot change the fact that he has existed, does exist and will continue to exist in the current timeline. I keep making the same point about Everard's (mis)understanding of the mutable timeline because it feels fresh and slightly different each time.

My non-existence in a subsequent timeline is of no more concern to me now than is my non-existence after my death in the current timeline. My existence is bounded in any case. However, in at least this one timeline, I do exist and will cease to exist - at death, not before - but cannot cease to have existed.

Everard's thoughts continue:

"You'll stop ever having existed.
"Except, of course, in those bits of space-time pastward of the change moment, in which he was engaged on his pranks. He'd've pointed that out with some glee, maybe." (ibid.)

But why should a time traveler care whether any of his previous deeds are preserved in a subsequent timeline? Those deeds are past to him in any case. He is not going to relive them.

"Or maybe not. In any case, I doubt he fears obliteration. The ultimate nihilist." (ibid.)

To know that you will not/do not (Temporal language tense needed) exist in a subsequent timeline is not to face obliteration in your current timeline. To lay this ghost, maybe I need to respond on this issue every time I re-encounter it when rereading the Time Patrol series?

Meanwhile, what is about to happen to Varagan in his personal future in his current timeline? He has been arrested by the Time Patrol and will be sent to the exile planet but that requires another post.

Wanda's Apartment

The Time Patrol universe is vast. Let us focus on a detail. Wanda Tamberly's Stanford apartment is her temporary student accommodation and does not remain her place of residence for the rest of the series. We see it again only in a flashback to the conversation where Manse Everard had explained about the Time Patrol. In "The Year Of The Ransom":

"...she asked quietly, 'How about telling me the whole truth?'
"'An outline of it,' he agreed. 'That alone will take a couple of hours.'
"- In the end she sat wide-eyed on the sofa..." (Time Patrol, p. 717)

In The Shield Of Time, the chapter headed 1987 A.D. on pp. 26-33 recounts some of the intervening conversation. Wanda asks all the right questions about time travel like:

"'Where does the energy come from?'" (The Shield Of Time, p. 27)

Later, when she is a Patrol member:

"She examined her mount. About four-tenths charge on the cells, which used a principle she didn't even begin to understand and which made nuclear fission look like a water-clock."
-SM Stirling, "A Stitch In Time" IN Multiverse, p. 73)

So she is no wiser, at least about the technology.

Manse says:

"'...it is terrifying. It could turn out that you and I never had this talk today, that we and our whole world never were, not even a dream in somebody's sleep. It's harder to imagine and harder to take than the idea of personal annihilation when we die.'" (p. 31)

But they have had this talk today. There can be another, subsequent, timeline in which they have never existed but this is not that timeline. In this timeline, they can live out the rest of their lives remembering this conversation.

I suppose that there is some difference between being dead and never having been born but, when we are dead, we will not know about that either.

The Time Patrol In The Draka Timeline

It would be easy enough to synthesize Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series with SM Stirling's Draka series:

for whatever reason, Manson Everard travels from 1990 to 1776 or earlier;

in 1779, a random fluctuation in space-time-energy generates the Draka timeline;

returning to 1990, Manse finds himself in the wrong timeline, investigates and locates the point of divergence in 1779;

traveling back to that divergence point, he rectifies the timeline;

the Draka live out their lives in their timeline, neither knowing nor needing to care about any other timeline;

this could be just one story in a themed anthology - the Time Patrol in other sf series.

Must the Patrol always succeed in restoring its preferred timeline? Not necessarily, although the tone of the series is that the Patrol does always succeed. Dominic Flandry knows that the Terran Empire will fall whereas Manse Everard hopes and believes that the Time Patrol will not fail and that history will always lead to the Danellians.

A Conversation With Stane

Manse Everard and Charlie Whitcomb of the Time Patrol meet the time criminal Stane at the bottom of p. 36 of Time Patrol (New York, 2006) and kill him half way down p. 41. Stane is simply not the main focus of the story although he does serve his purpose very well as an archetypal time traveler trying to change history. Stane's main narrative role is to put temptation in the way of Whitcomb. Given the job of driving Stane's time shuttle to Patrol HQ in the nineteenth century, Whitcomb instead succumbs to his own wish to change history by saving his fiancee from a World War II bombing raid.

Everard tells Stane:

"'We came back looking for this mysterious Stane who seemed to be one of the crucial figures of history. We suspected he might have been a time traveler, peregrinator temporis, that is. Now we know.'" (p. 38)

Since they are speaking Latin, Everard should not have to explain "peregrinator temporis." This ingenious phrase is also used in Anderson's There Will Be Time (New York, 1973) in a full Latin sentence: "Es tu peregrinator temporis?'" (p. 62)

Everard displays an almost telepathic ability to guess Stane's intentions for the future in order to put the blaster-wielding criminal off his guard so that Whitcomb can attack him from behind with an ax - one English kingdom combining "'...Saxon strength and Roman learning...'" (p. 40), guided by the time-traveling St Stanius, able to unite Europe, Earth and then the planets in peace.

What do I think of Stane's utopia? The standard Patrol retort is that, if Stane succeeds, then neither I nor anyone I have known will be born. But we were born in the previous timeline. Why should the people who would live in a (hopefully) more peaceful timeline not have a chance to be born as well? The most basic moral objection to Stane's scheme is that it starts wrong with his murder of an inter-temporal trader and the theft of his time machine.

Britons

In "Time Patrol," Manse Everard and Charlie Whitcomb arrive at Addleton Barrow on a summer midnight in 464 AD.

"'Cultivated fields,' observed Whitcomb. His voice was hushed in the stillness. 'The Jutes and Saxons were mainly yeomen, you know, who came here looking for land. Imagine the Britons were pretty well cleared out of this area some years ago.'" (Time Patrol, p. 30)

Two observations here:

Cultivated fields are a far cry from the first century European wilderness that Everard will experience much later in his career. That wilderness was inhabited by these invaders of Britain.

Angles, Saxons and Jutes displaced the Britons to the South East and North West and bestowed the name "England" so how did the term "British" later come to signify the dominant culture in this island? When James VI of Scotland became James I of England, thus uniting the two kingdoms, he claimed to be restoring a lost Arthurian British unity as described in Geoffrey of Monmouth's work of historical fiction, The History Of The Kings Of Britain, which recounts the Britons' Trojan ancestry and consequent kinship with the Romans and lists not only Arthur but also Lear and Old King Cole as Kings of Britain.

Poul and Karen Anderson tackled a similar legendary history in The King Of Ys.

Novels And Time

Our overview of the plot of a novel resembles a time traveler's overview of a period of history. Thus, Poul Anderson's Time Patrolman, Manson Everard, travels to 1944 already knowing the course of World War II prior to that year. Similarly, I have just started to reread Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy but at the beginning of Volume III. The title character is in hospital but I already know how she got there.

Also, Everard knows that history can take a different course and we are familiar with different versions of a story. We have been since the Bible and Greek myth. In the case of the Millennium Trilogy, there are:

the novels;
a Swedish TV adaptation of all three novels;
a Hollywood cinema adaptation of the first novel;
a comic strip adaptation of the first part of the first novel.

We derive an additional pleasure from comparing clever variations of the story as the Greeks did with dramatic reinterpretations of their myths. If this works well, something happens that we do not expect but then things work out as they should. Everard can accept minor variations to history.

Four Significant Characters

In his Editor's Introduction to the fourth NESFA collection, Rick Katze writes that Manse Everard, David Falkayn and Nicholas van Rijn are in this volume and that Dominic Flandry will also be in the fifth. These are Poul Anderson's four most significant characters. Every dedicated Anderson fan has already read everything that there is to be read about each of the four. Anderson also has many comparable characters in other series and in single works.

Between them, the four named characters represent three institutions:

the Time Patrol, founded by Danellians and staffed by human beings;
the Polesotechnic League and the Terran Empire, founded by human beings and incorporating other species.

Van Rijn and Falkayn live in the same period;
Flandry lives in a later period of the same history;
Everard lives in a different kind of history.

Everard's timeline is single and mutable, hence the need for a Time Patrol, whereas the timelines connected to the Old Phoenix Inn are many and static with no direct contact. Thus, we read seven omnibus volumes of the Technic History with no reference to the Old Phoenix but do find van Rijn in the Inn elsewhere in the Anderson canon. Thus also, Anderson imagined both a Time Patrol universe and an Old Phoenix multiverse.

The Time Patrol And The Old Phoenix

I do not think that Manse Everard of the Time Patrol can ever visit the inter-universal inn, the Old Phoenix. The premise of the Time Patrol series is a mutable timeline scenario where Patrol members work hard to maintain a single timeline. Even if they fail, their preferred single timeline is simply replaced by an alternative single timeline, of which we are shown three. There is no simultaneous coexistence of multiple timelines but it is inhabitants of such timelines that visit the Old Phoenix.

The Time Patrol is hard sf whereas the Old Phoenix multiverse incorporates fantasies. The inn is chartered by "...some power unknown..." and could lose its license. (1) The landlord performs the only "Time Patrol" function that is necessary. He interrupts the conversation between Leonardo and Einstein when each is about to learn more than he should but he lets Valeria Matuchek inform Prince Rupert that, in her timeline, the English Civil War had led to regicide. Rupert prevents such an outcome in his timeline but it seems that he was supposed to do this so that no "harm" is done. In its single timeline, the Patrol must ensure that every atrocity happens on schedule.

(1) Anderson, Poul, "Losers' Night" IN Anderson, All One Universe, New York, 1997), pp. 108, 122.

Parallel Passages

" 'Sir, the German delegate is here,'
" 'Send him in,' rumbled the voice. 'Leave us alone but stand outside, just in case.'
"Everard entered. The door shut behind him. Scant light seeped through a leaded window."
-Anderson, Poul, The Time Patrol, New York, 1991, p. 375. 

" 'Commander Flandry, sir.'
" 'Send him in,' replied a deep, toneless voice. "Leave us alone but stay on call.'
" 'Aye, sir.' The lieutenant stood aside. Flandry went by. The door closed with a soft hiss that betokened soundproofing."
-Anderson, Poul, The Rebel Worlds, London, 1973, p. 127.

The first time I read the Time Patrol passage, I thought that I had read it before. A little research uncovered the Rebel Worlds passage. Anderson may have expected readers to notice a faint echo of an earlier work.

Manson Everard of the Time Patrol, in his guise as Everardus the Goth, meets the Roman general Petillius Cerialis to negotiate an end to a Germanic uprising against the Roman Empire. Dominic Flandry of Terran Imperial Naval Intelligence meets Admiral Hugh McCormac to negotiate an end to McCormac's Rebellion against the Terran Empire.

These works represent two different interactions of science fiction with history. The Time Patrol series is historical science fiction. The Dominic Flandry series is part of a science fiction future history. Cerialis and the rebels against whom he fought are historical figures. Cerialis and McCormac exist in the past and the future of different timelines because the timeline guarded by the Time Patrol does not include the Terran Empire defended by Flandry. Thus, despite their uncannily parallel passages, these two scenes are about as far apart spatiotemporally as they could be although Anderson's imagination encompasses both.

In Anderson's fiction, the Roman Empire exists in at least three pasts when:

(i) gods exist and magic works;
(ii) the Time Patrol exists with time travelers sometimes mistaken for gods;
(iii) the Roman Empire provides a model for the later Terran Empire.

Alternatively, in The Golden Slave, set during the Roman Republic, we see neither real gods nor time travelers but the human originals of Odin and Thor so that this novel is neither historical fantasy nor historical science fiction but historical fiction and could be set in the past of the Terran Empire.