On the current Poul Anderson Appreciation blog, I have, at various times, discussed:
Anderson's thirteen-installment Time Patrol series;
his three independent time travel novels;
seven short stories about different kinds of temporal displacement.
Merely futureward "time travel" is not real time travel but can be used to present the culture shock that is one theme of time travel fiction. Anderson's time travel canon is more comprehensive than any other fantasy or sf writer's.
By scrolling through this blog from the beginning, it would be possible to compile a systematic list of the treatment of both causality paradoxes and of many historical periods in these twenty three works. I might do this eventually, just as I have started to gather together Anderson's "Cosmic Environments." Meanwhile, anyone else is welcome to systematize the posts on time travel!
3 comments:
Hi, Paul!
Poul Anderson's short story "Welcome" is a particularly striking example of the culture shock suffered by a man from the past who traveled to the future.
Sean
Sean,
Yes. That and "Time Heals" were the two that I had in mind.
Also, I suppose that "The Long Remembering" is a time travel story - as different as possible: mental pastward travel as against physical futureward travel.
Paul.
Hi, Paul!
Yes, I should perhaps have mentioned "Time Heals," as well. Because of examining the idea that a man who traveled from the past to the future was unable to adapt to how DIFFERENT life and culture had become.
"The Long Remembering" a an example of MENTAL travel to the past? Maybe, but the viewpoint character we see at the beginning and the end only "remembers" what he saw and experienced after "waking" up.
Sean
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