Saturday 6 August 2016

Poul Anderson's Volumes Of Time Travel

Apart from a revised Past Times, how should the rest of Poul Anderson's time travel fiction, the series and the novels, be packaged for republication?

The Time Patrol series would be complete either as three collections and one long novel or as one omnibus collection and one long novel.

The remaining three novels are not only independent of each other but also are connected in different ways to other works:

There Will Be Time belongs in a trilogy with a collection and a novel featuring the Maurai Federation;

The Dancer From Atlantis is one of what I call the "3 B.C," i.e., three novels of different genres set B.C.;

The Corridors Of Time, like the long novel, The Boat Of A Million Years, Past Times and, potentially, another collection, is set in several periods and might therefore belong, in the Complete Works, to a section that could be called "Many Times."

Thus, Anderson's time travel stories and novels do not form one discrete section of his complete works. Nevertheless, they remain a major contribution to time travel fiction.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I think THE DANCER FROM ATLANTIS and THE CORRIDORS OF TIME, being completely independent works, should form a single volume in any COMPLETE WORKS OF POUL ANDERSON.

Sean