"Manse Everard's timecycle appeared in the secret part of the building early one May morning. He had to wait a minute or so at the exit when the door indicated that somebody was passing by on the other side who shouldn't see that it wasn't merely a wainscot - doubtless an ordinary employee of the company. Then it opened to his key. The arrangement seemed a bit clumsy to him, but he supposed it suited local conditions."
-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 467-649 AT 2, p. 477.
Imagine people working in a twentieth century office not suspecting that such a secret was concealed behind a wall. In different works by Poul Anderson, time travelers, immortals and extraterrestrials operate secretly among us. Imagine a scenario where all three groups operated, hidden even from each other. Time travelers from how many future periods? Aliens from how many extra-solar planets?
An immortal who has lived through successive historical periods;
a time traveler who has visited several historical periods;
an alien who has made a relativistic interstellar round trip between visits to Earth -
- have different relationships to those earlier periods.
There is a precedent for an export firm as a front for a secret organization. Ian Fleming's Secret Service was fronted by Universal Export until, when it had been penetrated by every other intelligence service, Univex was replaced by Transworld Consortium. In real life, when a young, sun-burned, civilian-garbed man of military bearing arrived at Heathrow Airport and asked to be driven to "Century House," the taxi driver replied, "Oh, the spook house?" The secret headquarters was known to more than KGB agents.
8 comments:
And, of course, in the Time Patrol universe aliens could also be visiting as time travelers.
Mr Stirling,
Yes, just to complicate everything still further.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And I was amused by the taxi driver's comment about "..., the spook house." And It's probably wiser for intelligence services not to bother trying to hide their existence--because both opposing intel services and their own people will soon know they exist. Real world examples would be the US Central Intelligence Agency or the fictional Imperial Naval Intelligence Corps created by Anderson.
And S.M. Stirling's three Shadowspawn books: A TAINT IN THE BLOOD, THE COUNCIL OF SHADOWS, and SHADOWS OF FALLING NIGHT is based on the apparently paranoid premise that the world IS being ruled by secret masters. In this case by a subspecies of mankind with all too formidably real powers and brought up to consider ordinary human beings as mere animals to be preyed on.
Sean
Sean,
I had better read this Stirling trilogy. Comparisons, e.g., with Anderson's "Interloper" should be possible. In that one, the secret rulers are aliens and the nonhuman beings who resist them are Terrestrial but this is all the same bag of ideas.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I do recommend Stirling's Shadowspawn books, if you can tolerate some pretty grisly parts. Science fiction for the paranoid is how I sum up the Shadowspawn books.
And I like the analogy you made with Anderson's "Interloper." And other stories of his touching on things like secret masters, alien invaders, or plain visitors could be listed. Such as "Details," THE WAR OF TWO WORLDS, and "Peek! I See You!". But WAR was the only of his works in which Anderson worked out in some detail his speculations about such matters.
Sean
The "Shadowspawn" series is technically urban fantasy with a SF twist, but it's also got strong elements of the horror genre. It's set in an ontologically rather troubling reality, quite intentionally -- it was meant to give a sensation of horrific things moving behind the illusion of everyday reality.
Mr Stirling,
I have ordered Vol I.
Paul.
Dear Mr. Stirling and Paul,
Mr. Stirling: I've thought of your Shadowspawn books as science fiction for the paranoid--and I would modify your comment a bit to say those books is urban science fiction with horrible things moving behind the illusion of everyday reality. An ontologically troubling premise? Absolutely!
Paul: And I look forward to any comments you care to make about A TAINT IN THE BLOOD, including possible analogies and comparisons to the works of Anderson. Stirling does mention Tolkien and THE LORD OF THE RINGS a few times in the series. For my part I watched out for any allusions to the Sarajevo tragedy of 1914, because of the Shadowspawn's role in that crime.
Sean
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