Saturday 16 August 2014

The Complete Time Patrol

Imagine a one-volume Complete Time Patrol on Bible-thin paper with the six Parts of The Shield Of Time incorporated into the table of contents, thus:

Time Patrol
Brave To Be A King
The Only Game In Town
Delenda Est
Gibraltar Falls
The Sorrow Of Odin The Goth
Star Of The Sea
The Year of the Ransom
Ivory, And Apes, And Peacoks
The Stranger That Is Within Thy Gates
Women And Horses And Power And War
Before The Gods That Made The Gods
Beringia
Riddle Me This
Amazement Of The World
Death And The Knight

Manson Everard's Time Patrol career begins at the beginning of "Time Patrol." Wanda Tamberly's begins at the end of "The Year Of The Ransom."

In term's of Everard's presence in the twentieth century:

he is recruited in 1954;

in "Delenda Est," he was last in New York in 1960;

Tom Nomura in "Gibraltar Falls" was recruited by the Patrol in 1972;

in "The Sorrow Of Odin The Goth," Everard is in New York in 1980;

from "Star Of The Sea" until "Death And The Knight" is, for Everard, almost a continuous sequence of events stretching from 1986 to 1990 although, in "Ivory, And Apes, And Peacocks," which he spends entirely in 950 BC, the twentieth century year date referred to is 1980.

The two works referring to 1980 were originally published together as a single volume but were then chronologically separated as the series developed further. In the completed sequence, "Star Of The Sea" refers back to "The Sorrow Of Odin The Goth" and ends in 1986 but before Everard's first meeting with Wanda on 30 October of that year.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Hi, Paul!

By and large, however, I would prefer to keep the different parts of THE SHIELD OF TIME as part of a single work within a complete collection of the Time Patrol stories. After all, that was how Poul Anderson preferred to do it--and I think we should be guided by what is known of a writer's intentions.

Sean