Miscellania

Image of Cornwall, where Lockridge/Lynx winds up in Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time (London, 1968).

Last night, we saw live transmissions from the International Space Station and astronauts spoke of going to Mars. I mention this as being relevant in a Poul Anderson context.

For a few days, I have been laid up with a cold, lying on my back, rereading The Corridors Of Time and tapping on a lap top. Hence, the even greater number than usual of posts per day. I must recover by the weekend for a long distance drive. Also, I must be approaching the limit of what I can write about Poul Anderson's time travel fiction.

The Corridors Of Time and There Will Be Time have much in common:

each is a short, self-contained time travel novel by Anderson;
each has historical, contemporary and futuristic settings;
in each, the central character learns to oppose the established time travel organization (or organizations) and shapes history through elaborate circular causality paradoxes.

Yet these works could not be more different:

their means of time travel are so dissimilar as to be opposite in every respect;
Lockridge, traveling along time corridors, winds up in the far past whereas Havig, time traveling by his own mutant ability, winds up in the far future;
although There Will Be Time is, as a time travel novel, self-contained and not part of any series, one of the future periods visited is that of the Maurai Federation which does appear in other works by Anderson.

Reading both, we reflect not that the author repeats himself but that his imagination is extremely diverse.