For clarity of thinking, it is important to understand the difference between an empirical question and a conceptual question. It is possible that there is a very small red triangle hidden in this room. We can respond to the possibility by searching the room very thoroughly. It is impossible that there is a square triangle anywhere in the room. We respond to this impossibility not by looking anywhere in the room but by analyzing the contradiction in the phrase, "square triangle."
In addition to logical impossibilities, there are also physical impossibilities. I cannot jump to the moon although there does not seem to be any contradiction in the phrase, "...jump to the moon." This might be partly a matter of linguistic precision. If I were defined very precisely as an organism with a limited range of physical capabilities that explicitly excluded the ability to jump to the moon, then it would become logically contradictory to state that this organism that is unable to jump to the moon is able to jump to the moon. But that still seems to leave open the logical possibility that, without undergoing any detectable enhancement in its physical abilities, an organism might nevertheless "miraculously" jump to the moon. But we would respond to such events if they occurred.
Knowing both what is logically impossible and also what is physically impossible delimits what could have happened even when we do not know what did happen. And I think that the main role of the logically impossible is to delimit what can happen, not to imply that anything that is merely logically possible might happen. Until further notice, the arrival of travellers from other times must be regarded as physically impossible.
We are still focusing more on the descriptions of nature than on what the characters are doing.
When Tauno and Niels ride on a common outside Copenhagen on "a sweet spring day" (p. 215):
new grass is "vivid" (ibid.);
leaves are "a green mist" (pp. 215-216);
the sky is "overarching blue" (p. 216);
storks return;
the breeze addresses three senses simultaneously because it is described as fresh, as loud and as "...full of damp odors." (ibid.);
hoofs thud.
The storks are not only part of the scenery but also symbols:
"...harbingers of summer, bearers of luck." (ibid.)
That is in the eyes of the beholders.
Contrast:
rain sluicing and brawling;
streets become rivers;
lightning flaring;
thunder sounding like "...huge wheels..." (p. 217);
wind whooping;
a tile stove heating a room;
candles lighting wainscot, hangings and carved furniture;
privacy behind closed doors;
the storm battering shutters during a conversational silence.
Then again:
"Spring ran wild with blossoms and birdsong, a season of love, a season of forgetfulness and farewells." (p. 219)
That is partly the season and partly what is happening to the characters.
Anderson's main contribution to future histories is his Technic History. In particular, The Technic Civilization Saga introduces three major characters separately in Volume I, brings them together in Volume II and presents the climax of their careers at the beginning of Volume III which then advances the History to its next main phase.
I think that Anderson's main contribution to time travel is that he wrote both the Time Patrol series and There Will Be Time. Without either ignoring or forgetting The Corridors Of Time etc, I do focus on the Time Patrollers and on the mutant time travellers. There are problems with time travellers being able to change the past and with them not being able to change it so Anderson, of course, addresses both sets of problems.
When many people start to think about time travel, they imagine different times as if they were different places coexisting at the same time. I travel from 2025 to 1925. Half an hour after I have departed from 2025, a second time traveller follows me to 1925. So he arrives in 1925 half an hour after I did? No, if he followed me to exactly the same time to which I had travelled, then he arrives in 1925 simultaneously with me. But he could also have arrived in 1925 five minutes before I did and have already been there/then waiting for me.
If there is a single timeline, then anything that I did in 1925 had already been done long before I departed from 2025. Any consequences of my actions in 1925 are not waiting to come into effect after I have departed from 2025. They have already happened. On the other hand, if the consequences of my actions in 1925 occur in a divergent timeline, then they do not affect the timeline from which I depart to 1925. The Time Patrol is unnecessary.
(This post is dedicated to new blog commentator, TJ Overton. See the combox here.)
"[Eyjan] and her brother walked behind as the four left the strand, that their bodies might shield the humans from the wind that streaked in off the sea." (IV, p. 211)
That has to mean something. Wind from the sea signifies a threat to come. Also, the merfolk will be better equipped to counteract such a threat both to themselves and to their human allies. If Poul Anderson had not intended such an implication, then he would not have ended this chapter as he did. A peaceful wind would have meant that any threats were past. A chapter ending without a wind would have been harder to interpret! This makes us check ahead to the ending of the final chapter before the Epilogue. There we find that Tauno's mate (somehow) calls up "...a strong breeze." Then:
"Their craft surged forward, north-northwest over the Kattegat, to round the Skaw and find the ocean. Above her mast, catching on their wings the light of a sun still hidden, went a flight of wild swans." (XI, p. 256)
The wild swans symbolize the freedom of the merman's surviving children.
A ship crosses the Baltic Sea from Copenhagen to Bornholm and docks at Sandvig near Hammer House.
Whitecaps are gray. The sky is pale and whistling. Pebbles rattle. Gulls fly and mew. Brown tangled kelp, strewn on the sand, bladders popping, smells of the deeps. Also: dunes, grass, moor, heather and a standing stone. (Three senses.)
The merman's children wade ashore, naked, Tauno's hair greenish-gold, Eyjan's bronze-red with a seaweed undertint.
Conversation commences but I have formed the habit of pausing on the descriptions. And what descriptions these are with the merfolk effectively personifying the elements and the deeps. In fact, in the prevailing mythology, merpeople are entirely of nature because they lack the human souls that would link them to the supernatural. But they have been in those deeps that the kelp evokes.
(Here, it is time for a pause for other reading.)
What is it like to haunt the lake where you drowned? Poul Anderson imagines even this. Winter is lonely. Fish, never good company, grow sluggish and lose:
"...their gleaming summer grace." (p. 206)
Sleeping frogs no longer croak. Migrators have left. The remaining waterfowl neither swim nor dive and call but thinly over the bare trees and snow.
For months, Nada floats and drifts, neither blinking nor breathing. She is scarcely there, as Homer imagines the shades in Hades.
Then the Christianized merman, Vanimen, threatens this inoffensive being with endless burning. Nice one, Vanimen! (I don't think.)
