Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series comprises thirteen installments if we count the tripartite novel, The Shield Of Time, as three. The shorter Parts One, Three and Five are introductions to the longer Parts Two, Four and Six, respectively.
In the first seven published installments, the only way for the past to be changed/causality to be violated is by the actions of time travelers. A different idea grew in (I think):
"The Year of the Ransom";
The Shield Of Time, Parts Two, Five and Six;
"Star of the Sea."
There is a big revelation in Shield..., Part Six, but it had been led up to. "Star of the Sea," published after Shield..., is set earlier. Thus, it shows Everard reflecting on the instability of space-time before he had experienced this instability catastrophically in Shield...
In "The Year of the Ransom":
"For reality is conditional. It is like a wave pattern on a sea. Let the waves - the probability-waves of ultimate underlying quantum chaos - change their rhythm, and abruptly that tracery of ripples and foam-swirls will be gone, transformed into another."
-Poul Anderson, "The Year of the Ransom" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 641-737 AT 3 November 1885, p. 671.
Observations On This Passage So Far
(i) This is the earliest indication that reality can be changed by anything other than the action of a time traveler - in fact that reality can change itself, chaotically, randomly, acausally. But that indication is not developed any further in this story.
(ii) Certain words and phrases: "change," "abruptly," "will be gone" and "transformed into another" imply a second temporal sequence. Change involves a state changed from and a state changed to. Thus, just as, in our twentieth century, Germany changed from a single state to a divided state to a reunified state, that entire history might change into one in which, e.g., Germany remained a single state throughout those same decades. The divided state and the reunified state are related to each other as before and after along our familiar temporal dimension. The history with Germany divided and reunified and the history with Germany remaining a single state throughout must be related to each other as before and after along a second temporal dimension - I think.
(iii) In this passage, Everard has just traveled by hansom cab from the London office of the Time Patrol in 1885. In "Time Patrol," Everard as a new recruit starting his first job for the Patrol visited that office in 1894. If Mainwethering of the London office remembered in 1894 that a considerably older and more experienced Everard had visited the office just nine years earlier, he rightly did not say so.
(iv) It is taking longer than expected to discuss these passages adequately so this topic will become a serial.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
As regards your point (iii), I think part of the training of Mainwethering, Manse, and all other Patrol agents would include stressing the need NOT to "let on" to any fellow agents that they had first met their older selves before these persons first met then when younger. At least for the first few times these agents met each other.
I look forward to any comments you make about Stirling's THE COUNCIL OF SHADOWS. One think I recall from the first book was how the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo was engineered by the Shadwowspawn, probably by Etienne Maurice Breze himself. Before I reread these books for a second time I THOUGHT the Shadowspawn had a personal grudge against the Habsburgs, due to thinking Francis Ferdinand and his uncle Emperor Francis Joseph refusing to have anything to do with the Shadowspawn. But I was wrong. The Sarajevo crime was a step in the Shadowspawn achieving de facto domination of the world.
Sean
Post a Comment