The Complete Time Patrol Series

Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, with its appropriately long publishing history from 1955 to 1995, is complete as one omnibus collection and one long novel.

The collection of the Time Patrol stories has expanded four times and changed its title three times - although, on the third occasion, merely by losing the definite article. Each expansion has incorporated only one or two newer works. Of these, two are shorter than the original four but another four are considerably longer. Thus, the collection has more than doubled its length both in terms of the number of items included and, even more so, in terms of word count.

There have been:

The Guardians Of Time with four stories, "Time Patrol," "Brave To Be A King," "The Only Game In Town" and "Delenda Est," all originally published in The Magazine Of Science Fiction (FSF);

The Guardians Of Time with five stories, incorporating "Gibraltar Falls," which had subsequently been published in FSF;

Annals Of The Time Patrol with seven stories, incorporating "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks" and "The Sorrow Of Odin The Goth," which had subsequently been published together as Time Patrolman;

The Time Patrol with nine stories, incorporating "The Year Of The Ransom," which had subsequently been published as a single volume, and the new "Star Of The Sea";

Time Patrol with ten stories, incorporating "Death And The Knight," which had subsequently been published in an anthology of original short stories about the Knights Templar.

Thus, The Guardians Of Time remains the complete FSF Time Patrol collection.

The novel, The Shield Of Time, is divided into six Parts. The odd numbered Parts are one brief prelude and two brief interludes whereas the even numbered Parts could each have been published as a distinct work although they also contain flashback chapters connecting them into a single narrative. Thus, the entire series has thirteen installments.

How the series needs to be tidied up:

"Death And The Knight" is a sequel to The Shield Of Time so should in future be collected at the end of the novel, not at the end of the omnibus collection;

"The Year Of The Ransom" is a prequel to "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks," which is the direct prequel to The Shield Of Time, so "Ivory..." should be moved to the end of the collection after "The Year Of The Ransom," which was placed at the end, I think, in the mistaken belief that it was the direct prequel to The Shield...;

"Gibraltar Falls" was placed in the middle of The Guardians Of Time so that "Delenda Est" would remain the climax of that volume but I think that, in the omnibus collection, "Gibraltar Falls" belongs after "Delenda Est" because its text reflects the passage of time between the publication of the original tetralogy and this new addition to the series.