Anderson's premise is that the past can be changed, therefore a time travel organization exists to guard it. Heinlein's premise is that the past cannot be changed but a time travel organization can nevertheless do some good. It cannot prevent a war that happened but can have prevented a war that mysteriously did not happen because nuclear weapons were sabotaged.
Like Anderson's Time Patrol, Heinlein's Temporal Bureau recruits and operates secretly throughout history. Heinlein refers to pre-Christian Crete but, unlike Anderson, does not describe any past periods.
A similar story is James Blish's "Beep"/The Quincunx Of Time which ends with the recruitment of a new agent of the Service, an organization that does not travel through time but receives messages from the future, then causes future events.
The Time Patrol and the Temporal Bureau are an intriguing contrast and we would like to know more about the latter.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And your chief contribution to Andersonian Time Patrol commentary has been to convincingly argue that alternate time lines "annulled" or "deleted" by the Patrol did not simply cease to exist, to have NEVER existed, as Manse Everard thought, but that they became alternate universes the Danellians/Patrol could no longer access.
Heck, OUR timeline might be a "deleted" universe because our history does not contain a real Sherlock Holmes, but the Danellian timeline does! (Smiles)
Sean
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