routine use, taking the concept for granted in order to get on with a story of, e.g., intercultural conflict;
loose use, treatment of the concept for its own sake but without rigor;
brilliant use, making new points about the concept.
Some Of The Examples Cited
Routine
L Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall and Anderson's "The Man Who Came Early" use lightning bolts.
Robert Nathan's Portrait Of Jennie - I need to read this.
Loose
Anderson's Guardians Of Time postulated a temporal police force but did not study the consequences of causality violation because the author did not want to tell such stories in this series.
Brilliant (according to Anderson)
Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court pointed out that intercultural conflicts would occur.
HG Wells' The Time Machine pointed out that deliberate time travel should be possible.
Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" and "All You Zombies -" developed circular causality.
My Idea Of "Brilliant"
Not Twain.
The cited works by Wells and Heinlein.
The Door Into Summer by Heinlein.
Almost everything on this theme by Anderson.
Previously discussed works by Tim Powers, Jack Finney and Audrey Niffeneger.
I disagree with Anderson as to which of the two Heinlein short stories is the better.
2 comments:
A few months ago my book club discussed '1632' by Eric Flint, in which a US town is dumped from 2000 to 1630's Central Germany. In the course of this I mentioned a bunch of stories on somewhat similar themes & was asked to make a list.
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - Mark Twain
exactly what it says on the tin :)
Lest Darkness Fall - L. Sprague de Camp
Martin Padway dumped from 1938 Rome to 535 Rome
He has unlikely but possible knowledge to give him a chance of personal survival & to make history better. Eg: he is an archeologist, is fluent in both 20th century Italian & Classical latin so he can immediately converse in the intermediate language of the time. He has read with great attention the history by Procopius of what is about to happen.
The Man Who Came Early - Poul Anderson (one of my favorite SF authors)
Short story. Man dumped from 20th to 10th century Iceland.
A much more pessimistic take on the prospects of such a time castaway.
Anderson's Time Patrol stories may also be of interest.
Island in the Sea of Time - S. M. Stirling (& Sequels)
Another case of a whole village moved in time.
In this case Nantucket of about 1999 AD dumped to about 1200 BC.
Much of the conflict in the series arises from some of the time castaways preferring to use future knowledge to make themselves kings & aristocrats among the 'primitives' rather than being citizens of the Republic of Nantucket.
Safehold series - David Weber
Not time travel.
In the prologue humanity develops a Faster Than Light drive. They find evidence that one species has been exterminating possible competitors. Humanities preparations for the conflict aren't enough to win. The rest of the story is centuries later on the planet Safehold where a faction that wants to keep humanity permanently preindustrial to avoid attracting attention has control. Then what is done by some who don't like that policy drives the story.
Kind of related oddity: This is the one I thought might interest Lois
Uncleftish Beholding - Poul Anderson
A short essay in English as it might have been, if rather than importing words from Greek & the Romance languages, English speakers had coined new Germanic terms for new scientific concepts. I enjoyed figuring out what the 'Ander-Saxon' terms meant.
Kaor, Jim!
I was not satisfied by Eric Flint's 1632, despite reading it with interest. I thought he had Grantville, W VA surviving too easily in the chaos of Germany during the middle of the Thirty Years War. That might be why S.M. Stirling had Nantucket dumped back to about 1240 BC, a small town on a remote island far from anybody who could have done it damage improved the chances of survival.
I also thought Flint was depicting the residents of Grantville in too idealized a way. Humans being what they are, I would expect some to be like the William Walker and Alice Hong we see in Stirling's Nantucket books. And others too, nowhere as vicious, would simply want to leave Grantville and seek their fortunes in fairly legitimate ways. Which is also what Stirling shows us happening.
Some of the later contributors to the 1632 series do flesh out Flint's premise in more convincing ways, such as the book set mostly in Venice and focusing on the Galileo case.
Ad astra! Sean
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