Why I Am Posting About The Time Patrol

I have posted about the Time Patrol before but did not expect to do so again, certainly not in such detail. I had read or reread and posted about all of Poul Anderson's novels and series with the single exception of one volume of his detective trilogy so I looked at those of his collections that I have, first for stories not yet read, then for stories not read recently.

The collections include Past Times with its excellent time travel stories. I expected to reread and post about the entire contents of this collection. However, the time travel stories, "The Nest" and "The Little Monster," renewed an interest in Time Patrol which, after all, is another of Anderson's collections. "The Nest" describes an organization of time traveling brigands whereas the Patrol opposes such brigands. "The Little Monster" describes a technological future sending explorers into the past, as does the Patrol. "Nest" and "Monster" are good but short whereas Patrol is long and seemingly endless so it was natural to go there next.

I would like to see Past Times revised so as to include "The Man Who Came Early," another sort of pre-Patrol time travel story, and to exclude non-time travel stories and items which, of course, should be collected elsewhere. "The Light," a space travel story with good accounts of walking on the Moon, also belongs in an anthology of "First Man on the Moon" stories, e.g.:

"The Man Who Sold The Moon" by Robert Heinlein, not about the man who first landed on the Moon but about the man who financed the journey;

"Wrong Way Street" by Larry Niven - a later astronaut who lands on the Moon, then time travels, can thus become the first man on the Moon;

"Forms of Things Unknown" by CS Lewis connects a Moon landing to Greek mythology;

"The Light" by Poul Anderson connects a Moon landing to Renaissance art;

extracts from relevant novels by Wells, Burroughs, Heinlein etc.

I have not read any of Jules Verne's three interplanetary novels so I have ordered them through the Public Library. (His characters do not land on the Moon.)