The Little Monster IV

Poul Anderson, "The Little Monster" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984).

A million and a half years ago, at night, Jerry Parker saw strange constellations, heard a roar, yelps, a scream and wings and thought:

"If nothing of him came home, except his clean-picked bones..." (p. 142)

We think, "If he died that long ago, then even his bones would not survive until his 'home' year (which we learn on the following page is 1995)," because we do not yet know that the rules of time travel in this story entail that his body, dead or alive, will be yanked back to its exact spatio-temporal departure point after thirty hours in the far past.

There is a stark contrast between Jerry's memories of home:

"...gentle countrysides, gleaming cities, aircars murmuring through the heavens..." (p. 143)

- and "...dry savannah under a cruelly bright sun, 1,500,000 B.C...." (p. 149)

- especially since Anderson also presents the point of view of the pre-human inhabitants of that savannah as I tried to convey in the previous post.

"Aircars" are a ubiquitous feature of Anderson's fictitious futures although they do not usually fly as close to the present as 1995. This 1995 is now what I call a "past future" like some more famous ones: 1984 and 2001 - Dan Dare's first adventure was dated 1999. But Anderson's History of Technic Civilization is safely set further in the future than the expected life spans of his readers and his Time Patrollers, although they know the entire history of the twentieth and twenty first centuries, wisely do not refer to any of it in detail until after the events have occurred from the point of view of Anderson's readers.