Do H. Beam Piper's Terro-Human Future History and Paratime Police series approximately correspond to Poul Anderson's Technic History and Time Patrol series, respectively? The Paratime Police travel between parallel timelines whereas the Time Patrol travels through time. However, both series address the question of alternative histories so their most basic premise is identical. I bought a copy of
Lord Kalvan Of Otherwhen but never got into it.
(Short post at Motorway Services.)
5 comments:
Paul:
I have to disagree with the phrasing that the "most basic premise [of the Paratime Police and Time Patrol stories] is identical." The Time Patrol must safeguard even evil people if history turns on their existence and survival (no killing Hitler, or saving Lincoln, Gandhi, etc.).
The Paracops' prime directive is: don't let other timelines learn that Home Time Line exists and is a parasite on them. They'll murder anyone they feel they need to, to protect that secret, and unless the victim is established as a very nice person, they'll kill him/her without much qualm. Paracops don't have to worry about causal violations, either. And the "sigma-ray needler" is a no-noise, no-flash death ray. "Heart failure, or 'he just died.'" Very handy for getting rid of someone who knows too much, in a timeline not advanced enough to recognize the signs of such a weapon. Lord Kalvan would've suffered just that kind of tragic heart failure if the Paracop hadn't realized that Kalvan, for his own reasons, was himself working to preserve the secret.
They DO have a sense of morality, and in "Time Crime," most Paratimers are shown to be outraged by the brutality of the "Wizard Traders" (slavers). But they wouldn't have intervened against the slave trade if it weren't crossing timelines and thus jeopardizing the Paratime Secret. Indeed, the Paratime Police became AWARE of the Wizard Traders only because a Paracop on inactive status was acting as security chief for a fruit plantation that bought slaves who he noticed were from "outtime." (The plantation manager was disgusted at having to keep slaves, but the farm existed in a timeline where slavery was part of the accepted order of things. When in Rome....)
David,
I wrote in haste at Motorway Services. The identical premise I meant was that history could have gone differently so stories can be set in alternative timelines. The mechanics are different: Piper has parallel timelines whereas Anderson has a single mutable timeline.
Paul.
Paul:
Another big difference is that in MOST of the Paratime stories, the point of difference between histories is so far in the past that the timelines have practically no resemblance to each other except for being inhabited by humans. PA's world in which the Carthaginians won the Punic Wars? Try for contrast the world shown in *Lord Kalvan*, where the Indo-Europeans crossed Asia and spread into North American from the west.... (And yet the Battle of Fyk still managed to duplicate the Battle of Barnet from the Wars of the Roses, right down to the cry of "Treason!")
Try, too, worlds where the very racio-ethnic groups are nothing we'd recognize. Sort of like how Malcolm Lockridge was puzzled by Storm Darroway's appearance, because he couldn't figure out what mixing of genes (to a degree the culture of his time wouldn't stigmatize, that is) had produced those features, beautiful though they were.
You can come up with any number of alternative histories, of course. Vis a vis Poul's story, THE SADNESS OF ODIN THE GOTH, if the Goths -had- beaten the Huns (and thus avoided the Volkerwanderung, Central and Eastern Europe would probably have ended up almost entirely Germanic-speaking -- the Slavs disappearing as a linguistic group, or existing only as a small curiosity. Their great expansion was a function of the evacuation of the East Germanics via migration to the west.
Plus all the ways that individual lives could have gone differently with or without wider repercussions.
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