"Wildcat," "The Nest" and "The Little Monster" are three science fiction stories about time travel to the far past by Poul Anderson so you might think that they would be similar stories and you would be wrong.
Some time travelers are projected into the past for a finite period whereas others are sent for an indefinite period and still others travel freely in a conventional "time machine." (We owe this archaic terminology to HG Wells although we no longer call aircraft "flying machines" or computers "thinking machines.")
In "Wildcat," a group of time travelers from the story's "present" interacts with the ancient environment;
in "The Nest," a group of time travelers from different periods interact with each other.
In "The Nest," which I will reread next, we must persevere for several pages before we learn how these characters from different periods have come together. Could they be time criminals in the history guarded by the Time Patrol but not yet apprehended by the Patrol? Maybe not, because they have stolen a temporal vehicle from incautious futurians whereas, in its timeline, the Patrol polices all temporal excursions and would have prevented such incautious behavior.
Meanwhile, I am translating Virgil, eating lunch and going for a walk so further dispatches from the distant past will be delayed.
1 comment:
Hi, Paul!
Interesting, that "The Nest" might belong to the time line guarded by the Time Patrol. I never thought of it like that. But, on the whole, I would say no to that idea. We see no indications in the story of either the Normans or their recruits being aware of any danger they face from a Time Patrol.
And we do sometimes see time machines being obtained or stolen by various persons in the Time Patrol series. Examples being shown in "Time Patrol" and "The Year of the Ransom."
Sean
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