Prophetic Fiction

"Ivory, and Apes and Peacocks."

Chaim and Yael Zorach's children will join the Time Patrol. Manse Everard reflects:

"If not...could you stand it, watching them grow old, suffer the horrors that will come, finally die, while you are still young of body." (p. 247)

The phrase that attracts my attention here is "...the horrors that will come..." Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series was published from 1955 to 1995, this instalment in 1983. Anderson avoided describing any near future events and this paid off. The series has not become dated by specifying any "horrors" that have not come to pass, e.g., in the 1990's or in the early twenty-first century - but it was a safe bet that there would be horrors. In 2025, we have experienced and are still experiencing them. Anderson was able to leave it vague and yet get it right. The Time Patrol could still be part of our timeline - and yet no, it could not, because, in the Patrol's timeline, Sherlock Holmes was a real person! Also maybe Cyrus the Great was not really a Zoroastrian? Changes in historical understanding can date time travel fiction.

In any case, the "...horrors that will come..." is accurate.

Some Details In Tyre

"Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks."

Warm, windless weather;

creaking, splashing sweeps;

coxswain's drumbeat;

blue wavelets, glittering, chuckling and swirling;

dazzling water blurring sight;

"...trade through the known world..." (p. 230);

multi-storey houses of stone or cedar;

bustling piers;

list descriptions of men and their activities;

Tyrian dyes;

rolling sounds;

overwhelming vitality;

crippled beggars;

ancient Eastern smells.

There is more.

Tyre

"Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks."

Sorry, folks, today we are mainly gardening and preparing to deliver a talk this evening.

Years ago, an sf fan remarked to me that usually a time travel story merely informs its readers that its characters are in a particular past year whereas Poul Anderson describes the world in any given past year in minute detail. For example, he devotes several pages to the sights, sounds, smells and life in the harbour and streets of Tyre in 950 AD and all of this is well worth reading even before we arrive at the action: an attempt on Manse Everard's life. Another author might have started with the action.

Meanwhile, since I am an active being, that is all that I have time for right now.

Tyre, 950 BC

Poul Anderson, "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 229-331.

Manse Everard/Eborix the Celt arrives in Tyre in 950 BC. The Time Patrol base has received a blackmail threat to destroy the city. Everard suspects Merau Varagan. If we are reading the Time Patrol series in its original publication order, then we are as yet unfamiliar with Varagan. Everard recounts his first encounter with that individual, which has to have occurred between episodes, and, at the end of this story, he does indeed apprehend Varagan. Thus, like Moriarty, Varagan is introduced and defeated within a single episode. However, there is more. Another incident involving Exaltationists including Varagan had occurred between the first encounter and the Tyre incident and that is recounted in the later written "The Year of the Ransom." Finally, the tracking down of the remaining Exaltationists occurs in The Shield Of Time, PART TWO, which also involves a flashback to a conversation between Everard and Varagan after the arrest of the latter. Varagan has been promoted to the status of a continuing villain.

Everard And Exaltationists

Manse Everard encounters Exaltationists four times in three instalments in two volumes.

(i) The encounter in Colombia is recounted in a flashback in "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacock," collected in Time Patrol.

(ii) The encounter in Peru is recounted in "The Year of the Ransom," collected in Time Patrol.

(iii) The encounter in Phoenicia is recounted in "Ivory..." but with a coda in a flashback in The Shield Of Time, PART TWO.

(iv) The encounter in Bactria is recounted in The Shield Of Time, PART TWO.

This becomes confusing which is why I thought that it was worthwhile to set it out. That is the entire saga of the Exaltationists.

A Long Way

 

What a long way we have come from The Time Machine to the Time Patrol! 

The Time Machine is a single long story or short novel in which a single Time Traveller makes a single journey on a single Time Machine while the outer narrator considers "...curious possibilities of anachronism and of utter confusion..." (see here) whereas the Time Patrol is a series of stories and novels in which an organization of time travellers with bases throughout history avoids anachronisms and averts utter confusion. 

In The Time Machine, we engage with the discussion of Time and enjoy the descriptions of time travelling. With the Time Patrol, we engage with the discussion of time travel paradoxes and enjoy the history. 

Although Patrol timecycles bypass spacetime instead of dilating through it, the mutant time travellers of Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time recapture the Time Traveller's experience of observing external events flickering past. Anderson, in the Time Patrol and in his other time travel narratives, fully develops all those implicit "curious possibilities."

Leaving The Time Structure Intact?

"The Year of the Ransom."

Manse Everard tells Helen Tamberly that:

"'...the friar Estaban Tanaquil vanished mysteriously two years before, in Cajamarca.'" (p. 669)

(Tanaquil was Steven Tamberly.)

Julio Vasquez tells Everard and Helen Tamberly:

"'Apparently the friar and a soldier went into the house where the hoard was kept one night. When they did not reappear by dawn, the guards grew nervous and opened the door. They were not inside. Every door had been watched. Sensational rumors flew.'" (p. 678)

(A locked room mystery. But a time machine can get in and out of a locked room.)

Vasquez concludes:

"'When I left, the general idea was that sorcerers had been at work. Hysteria was building rapidly. It could have hideous consequences.'" (p. 679)

Everard comments that such consequences:

"'...are not in the history we learned...'" (ibid.)

About another action of the Exaltationist time criminals, Everard reflects:

"We dare not undermine even this forbidden pattern of events." (p. 720)

Yet he later tells Wanda Tamberly:

"'Well, we do have to terminate matters in a way that leaves the time structure intact. We'll put Fray Estaban Tanaquil and Don Luis Castelar in that treasure house in Cajamarca, 1533, a minute or two after the Exaltationists bore them away. They'll exit on foot, and that will be that.'" (p. 732)

When Wanda recalls that the guards became worried, looked inside and found no one and that this generated sensational rumours, Everard replies:

"'...in such cases, when the past has been deformed, the Patrol does annul the events that flow from it. We restore the "original" history, so to speak. As nearly as possible, anyhow.'" (pp. 732-733)

Thus, they annul Vasquez learning that the room had been empty and that sensational rumours flew. Do they also annul Vasquez relaying this information to Everard and Helen Tamberly? I would answer yes because Vasquez relays this information after, not before, the events that he describes.

It seems that Patrol agents know exactly how much they can alter the timeline without causing greater unwanted changes but I do not see where they are able to draw the line.

Castelar And Varagan Escape, Lucifer Falls

"The Year of the Ransom" is carefully slotted into its place in Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series. Castelar, escaping from the Exaltationists, stabs Merau Varagan but:

"...wasted no time finishing him." (p. 666)

Castelar cannot finish Varagan because Everard must apprehend the latter in "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks." However, by the same token, Varagan's wound is so bad that two of his men immediately whisk him off for medical attention elsewhen which means that they are not in Macchu Picchu to be apprehended by the Patrol agents who attack as soon as Castelar has escaped. Again, Varagan has to be around later so he cannot be apprehended now.

Not every loose end is tied up satisfactorily but these are.

Now I must eat some curry and return to reading Neil Gaiman and maybe also some of Mike Carey who inherited the retired Lucifer Morningstar from Gaiman. 

In "The Year of the Ransom," an Exaltationist who had been hovering on a timecycle above Macchu Picchu:

"...fell as Lucifer fell." (p. 721)

Sometimes all fiction feels like a single series.

A Time Machine In A Spaceship

I was in a science fiction bookshop that sold no science fiction at least not in the sense that I was looking for. There were no novels by Wells, Heinlein, Anderson etc. The "science fiction" of this bookshop was all media-related:

Star Trek

Star Wars

Doctor Who

Battlestar Galactica

Alien

etc

We might as well be talking about different genres.

In Poul Anderson's "The Year of the Ransom," Manse Everard's timecycle appears in the receiver bay of a black spacecraft orbiting Earth on 15 April 1610. This reminded me of Kirk etc "transporting" on and off the Enterprise in Star Trek: a very rare occasion for something in sf proper to remind me of something in sf media-related. 

I first knew of Star Trek before it came on British TV because I was looking for sf by James Blish and came across his first ST adaptation collection. (See the attached image.) That is one of the few links between the two kinds of "sf."

Amend The Tale

"The Year of the Ransom."

Castelar proposes to change history:

"'I should begin by learning what did happen in Peru after I...left it,' Luis is saying. "Then I can plan how to amend the tale. Tell me.'" (p. 708)

That is so easy in fiction. Imagine: an author has written a well-known novel with a lesser known sequel; the sequel is out of print; the author's estate appoints a second well-known author to write another direct sequel to the well-known original novel but with a completely different plot and resolution. Both sequels exist. However, the earlier, out of print sequel is all but forgotten whereas the newly published sequel is widely read and accepted as such by current readers of the original novel. Any sf reader who learns of the earlier sequel can easily rationalize the contents of these two mutually incompatible texts as resulting from a split in time generating two divergent timelines. It sounds so easy. Luis Castelar will think that God sees history like that - and will also prefer to forget about the earlier sequel which he has "amended."