Tuesday 9 May 2017

Wells And Anderson

Comparisons
(i) HG Wells' Time Traveller travels to the future and meets Morlocks and Eloi whereas Poul Anderson's Time Patrolmen travel to the past but at the behest of the Danellians who live in the future.

(ii) Time Patrol timecycles are conceptual successors of the Time Machine.

(iii) Two short novels, The Time Machine and "Star of the Sea," are classics of time travel fiction.

(iv) The Time Machine is a single complete narrative whereas "Star of the Sea" is a culmination of a unique and significant series.

(v) Wells merely hints at time travel paradoxes whereas Anderson elaborates the paradoxes with increasing subtlety.

(vi) Wells' outer narrator wonders when the Time Traveller has gone whereas Anderson's Time Patrolmen wonder about disturbances of which the source is not in our reality.

(vii) Readers of The Time Machine can follow it by reading the unfinished earlier version, "The Chronic Argonauts," then Anderson's several works on time travel.

(viii) Relevant works by a few other authors can be recommended but Wells and Anderson provide a framework for considering the concept of time travel.

(ix) These remarks were meant to introduce a post but instead have become a post.

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Other writers besides Wells and Anderson have used the idea of time traveling. I think I like best L. Sprague De Camp's LEST DARKNESS FALL.

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
Yes. A source for Anderson.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And it's a book still very much worth reading and rereading.

Sean