Jack Havig by an act of will pulls the same stunt as the Time Traveller.
A Time Patrolman, seated on his timecycle, disappears from one set of spatiotemporal coordinates and appears at another with neither experienced duration nor physical aging between departure and arrival.
Martin Saunders, able to move around inside his spatially stationary time projector, sees only grayness through its porthole. Thus, the time projector resembles the Doctor's TARDIS except that the latter is bigger inside than out and moves through space as well as time.
Wardens and Rangers walk or drive along corridors that have been constructed in space, then rotated onto the temporal axis.
A different kind of machine projects travellers through time.
The Time Traveller, while travelling, sees Earth changing, e.g., seasonal changes ceasing, the day lengthening or the sun growing and reddening, whereas Saunders must periodically stop to check whether he is under the sea, inside a mountain, in empty space, in a molten environment etc. Thus, a lot hangs on what means of time travel is imagined.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
H.G. Wells' THE TIME MACHINE, was of course the pioneering story which began the theme of time traveling in science fiction. And that work deserves to continue to be read both for its own merits and for how Wells handled the very beginnings of that subgenre of SF. But later authors, such as L. Sprague De Camp and Poul Anderson, surpassed Wells.
And it's my additional belief that no other author has yet surpassed, in quality, depth of thought, attention to detail, etc., Anderson's Time Patrol stories. To say nothing, of course, of how Anderson still told us INTERESTING stories that many readers will read over and over.
Sean
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