Time Wars

Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 207-288.

There are perhaps two "Time Wars" in "Flight to Forever."

(i) In the twenty third century, the Martian colonies revolted against the Terrestrial Directorate. A defeated Directorate army leaped to the twenty fourth century and attempted reconquest but was smashed.

(ii) In 50,000 AD, when the Anvardi attack Sol, the Imperial ship Vengeance travels three days back in time, calculates the exact position of the Anvardian flagship seventy two hours hence, travels to that position and rematerializes beside the flagship simultaneously bombarding it with vortex cannon, blasters, gravity snatchers, atomic shells and torpedoes etc while the rest of the Imperial fleet, only one tenth the size of its enemy, attacks the Anvardi fleet which then recoils and breaks up when assaulted from within and without.

These are low key affairs when compared with the time wars between:

Wardens and Rangers in The Corridors of Time;
Havig's group and the Eyrie in There Will Be Time;
the Patrol and the Exaltationists in the Time Patrol series.

I have seen an anthology called Time Wars including Anderson's Time Patrol story, "Delenda Est," (Patrol versus Neldorians) and have read references to a series called Time Wars created but not written by Poul Anderson. I would be grateful for any information on the latter.

How Bad Can Things Get?

It is a commonplace in popular fiction that torturers are bad guys and bad guys include torturers. Thus, the hero of Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time sides with the Wardens against the Rangers only to learn that some Wardens have tortured a captured Ranger leader. In fact, back in their home era, the time-traveling Wardens have ritualized cruelty as part of their Nature Goddess philosophy. Consequently, the Wardens are after all among the bad guys.

However, fiction writers do not usually rub our noses in their villains' cruelty for page after page as SM Stirling does in Under The Yoke (New York, 1989). I have quoted several relevant passages and could quote more now but it gets a bit sickening. It is all too possible that some readers could derive sadistic pleasure from the Drakas' treatment of their serfs. Since the violence is extreme and without consent, such a response is inappropriate - and clearly not the author's intention.

Stirling uses alternative history sf to ask: how bad might a society get while continuing to function as a society? Poul Anderson showed us a history dominated by a Greek culture that had institutionalized child abuse and no less than four timelines without a scientific revolution, three in the Time Patrol universe and one in "The House of Sorrows." Both no Christianity and a Christian theocracy lead to no science. As the Greeks might say, everything in balance and nothing to excess.

The Draka push the limits of a sustainable society. Conquering Europe, they transfer serf cadre to the conquered territories and ship Europeans to their heartland for donkey-work, thus provoking a massive uprising with Civilian casualties, a mob turned back from the free zones only by flame-throwers, a whole mine gassed, survivors lobotomized and shipped out and:

"'...three big factory compounds out of order, jus' when demand fo' industrial motor systems is gettin' critical.'" (p. 339)

Another example: a Security Strategos would like to monitor Citizen movements more closely but, of course, Citizens would not want that. Meanwhile, an OSS man poses as a veteran whose injuries have impeded his speech - thus concealing his lack of a Draka accent.

An Understated Time War

Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time is explicitly about the great time war between the Wardens and the Rangers. However, a potentially even more destructive time war, between the Time Patrol and the Exaltationists, is almost hidden in Anderson's Time Patrol series. (The attached image shows an Exaltationist and a Patrolman.)

The four battles in this second war are to be found in just two of the ten stories in Time Patrol and in just one of the six Parts of The Shield Of Time. The War against the Exaltationists could have filled a volume in its own right although that is hardly necessary.

Three times a squadron of Patrol timecycles attacks an Exaltationist position and three times the leading Exaltationist, Merau Varagan, expounds his views in dialogue with a Patrolman.

Manse Everard almost captures Varagan in Colombia and Peru and does in Phoenicia and at last captures Varagan's clone mate in Bactria. End of Exaltationists but we might not appreciate how long the pursuit has been.

Neat Endings

A major difference between real life and fiction is neat endings in the latter. Poul Anderson was particularly good at pulling everything together with a happy ending all round.

"The Bronze Age, the new age was coming."
-Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time (St Albans, Herts, 1975), p. 204.

There will be galactic futures in The Boat Of A Million Years and Starfarers and a cosmic future in the Harvest of Stars tetralogy.

Even deaths can be transformed. In The Shield Of Time, Aryuk dies happy because he has driven the invaders from his people's land and the leader of the invaders is happy because his people go to a New World. If Lorenzo de Conti had not died quickly fighting Manse Everard, he would have died slowly of sickness on the Crusade. If Fulk de Buchy, Knight of the Temple, had not died quickly fighting Manse Everard, he would have been tortured and possibly also burned alive by the Inquisition.

Can we see a pattern developing here? It is also possible to write fiction that follows a group of viewpoint characters through their life and work without always showing how each case was closed or issue resolved. I think that one American police procedural did this? A British novel and TV series about Members of Parliament showed Government Ministers waiting in suspense to hear the outcome of a special forces assault on terrorists holding hostages but did not show us the military action. A graphic work about a press photographer in the Marvel Universe showed him covering superhero fights without necessarily knowing who was on which side or what the outcome was. Thus, there is scope for the fiction of life without neat endings and Poul Anderson would also have been able to master that approach.

Successor Of Heinlein

Three ways in which Poul Anderson succeeds Robert Heinlein:

future histories;
magic as technology;
time travel.

We have discussed all these before but let's revisit time travel. Heinlein wrote two short stories and one novel about what I call the ornamental garden of the circular causality paradox but nothing about causality violation whereas Anderson wrote three novels about circular causality, a long series about causality violation and enough other time travel short stories to fill a collection; thus, six volumes including one long novel and one omnibus collection.

Heinlein's circular causality works are ingenious but do not go anywhere or rather each goes in its own circle whereas, of Anderson's three circular causality novels:

The Corridors Of Time presents an intriguing new means of time travel, also vivid details of contemporary, past and future locations;

There Will Be Time connects with past history, Anderson's Maurai future history and a further future of interstellar travel;

The Dancer From Atlantis connects with Atlantis, Theseus and the Minotaur and characters from different historical periods and is one of three novels of different genres set BC.

Side Chapels And Poul Anderson

I mentioned here and here that, when I meditate in a side chapel (in fact the Parr Chapel) of Kendal Parish Church, I sit beside the tomb (see image) of the grandfather of the sixth wife of Henry VIII. She was Catherine Parr. In Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time, time travelers fly above England during the Queenship of Henry's second wife, Anne Boleyn.

When I meditate in a side chapel of the Jesuit Catholic Church of St Wilfrid in Preston, I sit before a statue of St Francis Xavier, "the Apostle to the East," who converted many Indians and Japanese and died before he would have entered China. Poul Anderson's extra-terrestrial character Axor has converted to Jerusalem Catholicism, has been ordained in the (fictional and ironic) Galilean Order, has taken the name "Francis Xavier" and travels through the known galaxy not in order to convert other aliens directly but in order to find evidence for a non-human Incarnation in the belief that this would vindicate Christianity. Historical Jesuits and fictional Galileans include scientists. (There is a Jesuit biologist in James Blish's A Case Of Conscience.)

In the Hindu Temple in Preston, I sit beneath images of gods including Krishna who is revered by Athelstane King in SM Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers. I also respect the Krishna of the Bhagavad Gita as the teacher of karma yoga, the way of non-attached action. Thus, even day trips to Kendal or Preston generate subject matter for blogging.

Soap Bubbles II

See Soap Bubbles.

Although I argue that a time traveler who prevents his own birth does not cease to exist, time travelers would nevertheless need to proceed with extreme caution. How can they know which kind of scenario they are in? -

(i) you cannot prevent your birth because your timeline is single and continuous;

(ii) you can prevent your birth because your timeline is single but discontinuous;

(iii) you can prevent your birth because timelines are multiple and divergent.

If a group of people found themselves in what seemed to be their own California long ago and if they wanted to return to their remembered version of the twentieth/twenty first century, then they would have to be very careful not to change the course of events in any way. Rolfe tests whether the Gate has taken him to the past:

"'The first time I came through, I carved numbers on rocks in places I could locate on both sides - boulders, cliff faces - carved them deep enough to last for thousands of years. There's no trace of them back on our side of the Gate, where we know it's 1946. I'm still going to get some astronomers to look at pictures of the night sky - the stars change with time, you know - but I'm pretty certain this is the same time as back in California, the spring of 1946.'" (pp. 26-27)

So he is in the present of an alternative timeline, not in the past of his original timeline although, even here, he was taking a risk. He might have been changing the past/initiating a divergent timeline by carving on those rocks.

Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time and There Will Be Time are set in scenario (i). His Time Patrol series is ambiguous between (ii) and (iii).

From Wells To Anderson; From One To Many

HG Wells wrote one classic, definitive time travel novel merely hinting at the paradoxes whereas Poul Anderson presents multiple fictions:

in the Old Phoenix sequence, many timelines coexist;

in the Time Patrol series, one mutable timeline exists because time travelers can change past events;

in The Corridors Of Time and There Will Be Time, one immutable timeline exists because time travelers cannot change past events;

in Starfarers, one immutable timeline exists because physical time travel is impossible.

Vast, systematic and comprehensive. And don't forget Wells.

Connections And Corridors

(What is wrong in the blurb reproduced in the image?)

Another connection: Stonehenge is built in The Corridors Of Time and visited in The Boat Of A Million Years. However, Corridors features time travelers waging war throughout history whereas Boat features immortals too few to do the same.

Chapter VIII of Boat introduces yet another immortal as she becomes a Buddhist nun and permanent pilgrim whereas Chapter IX reintroduces Svoboda as she ceases to be a Christian nun and convent-dweller!

Over the centuries, Aliyat has spent time in a harem, then in a brothel, whereas Svoboda has been in a convent - three ways for women to survive. They will live into a future when such means are no longer necessary.

Svoboda sees St Sophia in Kiev:

"...rising white and pale green in walls and bays, arched doorways and high glass windows, up and up to, yes, ten domes in all, six bearing crosses and four spangled with stars." (Boat, p. 141) (see image here)

"After that...she drifted like a rusalka beneath the water." (ibid.)

Two more connections: "...rusalka..." connects Boat to Anderson's The Merman's Children and Operation Luna, the latter the sequel to his Operation Chaos.

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.

Wellsian And Andersonian Time Travel

Jack Havig in There Will Be Time is like the Time Traveler without the Time Machine. (see also here.)

In The Corridors Of Time, time travel is technological but through literal corridors rotated onto the temporal axis, not on or in temporal vehicles, although the latter are developed later. There is a future period divided between urban Rangers and rural Wardens (see also here) but also a further vision (see also here) beyond that period - plus well realized past periods. See also here.

The Dancer From Atlantis has a temporal vehicle moving not only backwards in time but also around the Earth rather than remaining stationary in space.

In "Flight To Forever," as in The Time Machine, a modern man with a temporal vehicle travels far enough forward to be able to discern the future history of mankind.

"The Nest" and "The Little Monster" are Wellsian in their technological approaches to time travel and in their realizations of the periods visited.

Corridors And Time

Greg Bear, Eon (London, 2002).

It had not occurred to me to compare the cosmic corridor in Greg Bear's Eon with the temporal corridors in Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time. However, there is a clear parallel:

"'She said the corridor moves forward in time about one year every thousand kilometers.'" (p. 322)

Thus, a spatial interval inside the corridor corresponds to a temporal interval outside it, e.g., leave the corridor through a gate and emerge in 2000 AD; return to the corridor, travel 1,000 kilometers north to another gate and emerge in 2001 or south and emerge in 1999. In Corridors..., the width of a human body corresponds to a couple of months, with is not the relativistic space-time equivalence.

Differences
In Corridors..., many two thousand year long corridors stretch in straight lines along a single, immutable timeline on Earth whereas, in Eon, a single (so far) apparently infinite corridor extending from one end of a slower than light interstellar spacecraft curves between universes. Although the spacecraft pulling the corridor behind it has returned to the Solar System of a different timeline, the characters still speak as if people encountered in the past are direct ancestors of the spaceship crew, not analogues of those ancestors.

Another Parallel
Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time also combines slower than light interstellar travel with time travel: time travelers moving futureward, then pastward, within an STL ship can report the outcome of the journey before the ship's departure.

Original Time Travel Ideas

Poul Anderson's Original (Or As Near As Damn It) Time Travel Ideas
(i) Mutant time travelers.
(ii) Time corridors.
(iii) A usually stable but occasionally mutable timeline.
(iv) Random space-time-energy fluctuations.

(i) and (ii) are unusual means of time travel, both incompatible with the Time Patrol series, in which conventional (!) temporal vehicles are used. (Wells' Time Traveler would recognize them as improvements on his contraption.)

(iii) is the premise of the series. A mutable timeline necessitates a temporal police force. (iv), a new idea introduced at the culmination of the series, turns out to be the meaning of the Patrol. Even if no time traveler ever deliberately or accidentally changed the timeline, an organization of time travelers would still be necessary to counteract random changes.

(i) and (ii) are each the premise of a novel exploring elaborate circular causality paradoxes in an immutable timeline. As ever, Poul Anderson is systematically comprehensive.

Time Travel And Related Works

Over the past two months, we have surveyed the extraordinary timescapes of:

"The Little Monster" (a single time traveler);
"The Nest" (time traveling brigands);
Time Patrol and The Shield Of Time (a time travel police force);
The Corridors Of Time and There Will Be Time (two time wars).

Correspondents have been too polite to observe that I became unusually focused on Corridors.

Earlier along our own particular timeline, we also considered:

"Flight To Forever" (a journey around cosmic time);
The Dancer From Atlantis (the originals of some Greek myths).

Neither backwards nor forwards but sideways in time are:

"Eutopia" (Alexander did return from Babylon);
"The House of Sorrows" (the Jews did not return from Babylon) -

- and four of the many timelines with fleeting access to the Old Phoenix Inn:

Three Hearts And Three Lions (Carolingian mythology);
the two Operation volumes (working magic);
A Midsummer Tempest (Shakespearean history);
the History of Technic Civilization (Nicholas van Rijn).

My points are that:

Poul Anderson wrote many time travel and alternative timeline scenarios;
I have published a lot of posts about them;
but I have probably exhausted my current stock of observations on these works;
however, after the complexities of the Time Patrol, the time corridors and the Star Masters, it feels anticlimactic to return to the merely linear plots of Anderson's non-series short stories from which time travel has been an extended digression;
so I will have to find out where the blog goes next.

I usually do think of something to say - although not always at the recent rate.

Time War Intelligence II

Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time (London, 1968).

Lockridge can truthfully tell Brann:

the geographical location of the Wardens' new time corridor into the Ranger heartland;
that Brann himself will lead a counterattack down the corridor, killing all the Wardens in it except Storm whom he will capture with Lockridge in Avildaro in 1827 BC;
that he, Lockridge, escaped from Avildaro.

However, Lockridge must also lie. Exploiting Brann's ignorance of the people of Avildaro, he claims that Storm led them in ceremonial cannibalism, thus beginning Lockridge's disenchantment with her. He also claims that, by working as a deckhand on an Iberian trading ship, he traveled to Crete from where the Wardens sent him "'...to this year.'" (p. 149) Further disillusioned with the Wardens in their home era, he has made his way to Brann.

He must add:

"'After my story...I wonder why the Wardens didn't go back a few months and warn her.'" (p. 150)

Brann explains that they can't. They did not warn Storm before her departure to the twentieth century, therefore they must not attempt to. Has she been gone a few months? That has been long enough for Brann to learn of her disappearance. However, the uncertainty factor of about two months could prevent her from returning promptly, even if she had wanted to, and could also create difficulties for anyone attempting to warn her, although they know better than to try.

Could the Wardens, alerted by Lockridge, attempt an assault on Brann in the twentieth century just after his victory in the corridor? Brann explains that the Koriachs, Warden leaders like Storm, have absolute authority and are accountable to no one else:

"'For fear of spies, this one probably told no one except the few technicians she took along. Time enough to do that when the corridor was ready.'" (ibid.)

The result of this is that the current Wardens, now hearing of the twentieth century operation for the very first time and already preoccupied with many known activities in other periods, have no capacity "'...to organize a substantial force...'" (p. 151) for an extra intervention. If anyone was sent, then they would have been baffled by the uncertainty factor, but possibly no one was because: "'She has rivals who would not be sorry to lose her.'" (ibid.)

The secrecy necessary for the time war really works against its practitioners. And the Wardens work against each other. Can we compare Wardens and Rangers to cats and wolves?

The Triple Goddess

Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time (London, 1968).

Speaking of Stone Age dolmens, Storm Darroway says:

"'They adored the Triune Goddess, they who brought those burial rites here, Her of whom the Norns were only a pallid memory, Maiden, Mother and Hellqueen. It was an evil bargain that traded Her for the Father of Thunders...She will come again...'" (p. 23)

Here is another parallel with Neil Gaiman. The Triple Goddess, in various forms, is a major theme in The Sandman:

Morpheus consults the Fates;
the Fates try to warn Rose Walker of coming events;
Rose researches the Triple Goddess in TV sitcoms;
by granting Orpheus' wish for death, Morpheus takes family blood;  
therefore, the Furies attack him in the Dreaming;
after preparing his succession, Morpheus enters the realm of his older sister, Death.

If they can make the transition from prose to graphic fiction, then fans of Anderson's fantasies might appreciate The Sandman.

The Time Wardens' Period

Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time (London, 1968).

(I have only just recognized the Little Mermaid of Copenhagen on that cover.)

Malcolm Lockridge escapes from the Rangers into their future. Despite previous bad experiences in the futureward sections of time corridors, Brann orders his men to continue the pursuit on their gravity belts. Lockridge knows only that there were guardians with incomprehensible weapons. His corridor sled stops and the flyers approach.

The guardians' weapons do not harm bodies but do attack minds. Lockridge experiences Night, Fear, loss of sensations, eternal disembodiment in infinite space, a horrific presence, negation, cold, darkness, hollowness, a vortex, contraction and cessation.

Then, the opposites: music, the scent of roses, peace, sunlight, a friendly greeting in Kentucky English, a screen with changing colors, a door to a summer garden and another house across a lane.

Leaving the house with his hosts, John and Mary, Lockridge sees homes among high trees, a machine tending a lawn and people, some nude, two bowing respectfully to the continental councillor, John. Flying, they see mostly green land but also a clean city stretching for miles and the half-mile long silver ovoid of the Pleiades liner rising above the horizon. Crossing the Atlantic and approaching the Limfjord, they see woods, pastures, strange animals and a town with red walls and copper spires.

And that is all that we see of the period a thousand years after Lockridge's visit to the Wardens and Rangers. 

Rich And Colorful

I have been determined to continue posting about Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time as long as I was able to find new things to say. I have probably reached a limit by now but I am amazed at how much there has been. I never expected to follow the course of Lockridge's morning walk through Copenhagen or of his and Storm's car journey through Denmark.

Careful rereading of relevant passages discloses the intricacy and subtlety of the temporal journeys, time war and causal paradoxes. The Warden and Ranger realms and their single successor are briefly but fully realized as are the philosophical conflict between Wardens and Rangers and its place in the history of religion. The main past period in the narrative is the early second millennium BC but there are also vivid glimpses of the seventh and sixteenth centuries.

Superficially a mere action-adventure novel with heroes and villains fighting through history, The Corridors Of Time turns out to be one of it's author's richest and most colorful science fiction narratives.

The Pivotal Moment II

Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time (London, 1968).

It is very difficult to think these matters through to a final conclusion. If Storm's new corridor had emerged in the fortieth century immediately after her departure to the twentieth century, then there would have been no time for Brann to receive any warning about the new corridor. He would have been unable to lead any counterattack down the corridor and the Wardens' victory would have been complete.

However, maybe such fine-tuning of the operation was not possible. When a corridor is activated, it extends an equal distance in both directions. Corridors can be of different lengths but perhaps not of any length. The Wardens had to build a corridor that would not emerge before Storm's departure. They were limited both by their activation point in 1963 and by whatever length of corridor was available for them to use. So maybe this was the best that they were able to do. And it would have worked if not for an entirely unpredictable causal circle.

Both sides used circular causality to wage their war through history so maybe it was only a matter of time before a causal circle worked against both of them. At least from the perspective of observers within this universe, the distribution of causal circles along the timeline must be random, like the distribution of prime numbers along the number line. But, if causal circles are random, can their likelihood be calculated?

The Pivotal Moment

Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time (London, 1968).

I have identified the pivotal moment in all of history. In the later fortieth century, there is a short period after Storm has departed to the twentieth century but before Brann has counterattacked down Storm's new corridor from the twentieth century. That is the period during which Malcolm Lockridge must travel to Brann's headquarters and inform him of the new corridor.

When they speak, Brann says of Storm:

"'...she disappeared some time ago, undoubtedly on a major mission.'" (p. 148)

This suggests an elementary security measure. Storm should not be gone for "some time" but should return as soon as possible after her departure in order to minimize the period during which her antagonist can learn that she has disappeared and infer that she is on a major mission. But she must avoid returning before her departure because the time travelers do not want their future actions limited by foreknowledge.

In this case, Storm will not return to the fortieth century. She flees from the twentieth century to 1827 BC when, captured by Lockridge, then bound by his men, she is strangled by the dying Brann, who has just been freed by Lockridge - the agent of destiny.