"Death And The Knight"

Clark Kent grew up with Lana Lang and would later marry Lois Lane. Poul Anderson married Karen Kruse and later sold a Time Patrol/Knights Templar story to Katherine Kurtz. Real life is stranger than fiction. (I once knew of an interconnected Nichols, Nicholson and Nixon.)

"Death and the Knight" conveniently represents the Time Patrol series in the retrospective collection, Going For Infinity, not only because it is short but also because the paperback Tales Of The Knights Templar was less readily available by then. "Death and the Knight" has since been included in Time Patrol but should really be republished as a coda to The Shield Of Time.

Just as the Avalonian editor, Hloch's, introductory passages in The Earth Book Of Stormgate were incorporated into The Technic Civilization Saga, maybe Poul Anderson's interstitial passages in Going For Infinity could be reproduced before their respective stories in an eventual Complete Works of Poul Anderson? Obviously the many overlapping collections should not be republished as they stand.

Anderson writes of the next story in Going For Infinity (New York, 2002):

"If some of the thinking and feeling in it seems a bit strange, please remember that it's from the 1950's. That was another country." (p. 128)

"The past is another country" is a true and evocative saying, especially appropriate in time travel fiction as when Manson Everard visits World War II London in the first Time Patrol story. Everard lived through the War but now he is time traveling to it - a different experience.