Thursday 24 September 2015

Hypothetical Sequels

My ideas for a sequel to The Time Machine are here.

How might Poul Anderson have continued his Time Patrol series? Manse Everard would have had to leave that New York apartment and to move elsewhere/when and his relationship with Wanda Tamberly would have had to go somewhere, possibly towards marriage, as in SM Stirling's "A Slip In Time." (see here.)

Beyond that, each Time Patrol installment has been unique and unpredictable. For present purposes, I will count The Shield Of Time as three installments. Thus, the entire series comprises thirteen installments of two kinds:

those in which the Patrol contends with human villains/time criminals;
those in which the Patrol must address some other kind of problem generated by time travel.

The stories with villains are a minority and maybe develop the idea as far as it will go:

an individual villain (one story);
a collective villain (one story);
a more sophisticated collective villain (three stories).

For readers who enjoy heroic detective work followed by heroes versus villains action, there is plenty of that in these stories. In the remaining eight installments:

Patrol Specialist Keith Denison unintentionally becomes Cyrus the Great;
the Mongols threaten to invade North America;
a Patrol agent saves the life of a colleague who, according to the records, never returned home;
a Patrol agent mistaken for Wodan must betray his followers to preserve history;
a Patrol agent unintentionally inspires a pagan prophetess who will change history unless the Patrol counterintervenes;
a Patrol agent intervenes to help the Beringians;
a medieval man is a personal causal nexus;
an indiscreet Patrolman is arrested by the Knights Templar.

Any fourteenth installment would probably have been of the second kind but there is no way to project either its plot or its historical setting.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And it's my hope Poul Anderson would have written a Time Patrol story featuring how the Patrol had to stop or reverse an attempt to prevent the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in 1914. Considering the truly nightmarish century which followed the Sarajevo assassination, I can easily imagine the conflicted feelings of Manse Everard as he reluctantly but resolutely made sure the "doomed inheritor" went on to meet his fate.

And we do have S.M. Stirling's "A Slip In Time," giving us some hints about what have happened if the assassination had been prevented.

Sean