Is The Past A Foreign Country?

Jack Finney was the master of nostalgic time travel fiction. Many of his characters would agree that the past was a foreign country and also would want to emigrate there.

Poul Anderson's character, Manse Everard of the Time Patrol, sees it differently:

"The Midwest of his boyhood, before he went off to war in 1942, was like a dream, a world forever lost, already one with Troy and Carthage and the innocence of the Inuit. He had learned better than to return."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), p. 178.

Innocence lost is the consistent theme of Anderson's Time Patrol series.

In SM Stirling's Conquistador (New York, 2004), the investigators expect to find out of date attitudes preserved and defended on the other side of the Gate:

"'They've got to have kept two-way traffic through the Gate tightly controlled. So things would have changed less on the other side.'
"'Yeah, like my hillbilly ancestors, keepin' the old ways goin' up in the hollers, only more so.'" (p. 197)

Gate Security is what the New Virginians have instead of a Time Patrol. In both cases, the purpose is to maintain the status quo at all costs.

(The investigators coincidentally hit on the same terminology of "the Gate" as the New Virginians?)

Three Culminations

I thought that Jack Finney's two Time novels and Poul Anderson's two-volume Time Patrol series were the two culminations of time travel fiction but Audrey Niffeneger's The Time Traveler's Wife (the one of these works that also happens to have been filmed) joined the list as soon as I had read it and I hope that there will be a sequel, The Time Traveler's Daughter.

Finney: nostalgic time travel to earlier decades in the United States;
Niffeneger: a contemporary novel of relationships involving time travel;
Anderson: historical periods and processes and futuristic speculations.

Niffeneger perfects the circular causality paradox. Thus, her novel needs to be compared with Anderson's three non-series time travel novels rather than with his Time Patrol series. Unlike the three by Anderson, Niffeneger's novel is a longer work, is neither historical nor futuristic but entirely contemporary and deals with personal relationships, not with any wider issues.

Henry tells Claire not to sign a drawing because he has seen it unsigned in the future but she signs it... But events remain consistent despite this. (She was right to trim off the signature because they want their known future to be their experienced future. A time traveler who sets out to change events might succeed in which case they will be in a different timeline, which is not what they want.) See here.

What I am saying here is that I recommend not only Poul Anderson's time travel works but also certain others for comparison and that these others definitely include The Time Traveler's Wife.