The Physics Of The Anakro

Two futurian anthropologists, Sahir and his companion, embark on a pre-set course across Earth's surface from Hawaii to the protoman period in prehistoric Africa in their "mentated" space-time vehicle, the anakro;

time expeditions are few because the energy and environmental costs are high;

an immense energy concentration is necessary to warp the continuum;

they knew of a mysterious and monstrous prehistoric energy release and intended to pass close by it for a boost but passed too close;

because of a defect, they had drawn some higher animals along (only higher animals because of the "mentation" - amplified neural currents);

because of faulty insulation, the energy release interacted with their warp fields and blew out their interior power cybernets;

the radiation blast was lethal;

because other time travelers will investigate that energy release a year after the vehicle's crash landing, the stranded unwilling travelers should try to contact them for rescue;

the energy release is the volcano that destroys the island of Atlantis.

Addendum: Near the end of a month, I complete a round number of posts on Poul Anderson Appreciation, then publish a few posts on other blogs although, judging by the number of page views, most blog readers do not go there. See Time And (Sex In) Space.

It's Impossible!

Duncan Reid thinks:

"I'm almost at the machine.
"The time machine?
"Nonsense. A bilgeful of crap. Physical, mathematical, logical impossibility. I proved it once, for a term paper in the philosophy of science."
-Poul Anderson, The Dancer From Atlantis, CHAPTER THREE, p. 27.

Of course. Before he is accidentally pulled into the past, Reid inhabits a world like ours where it can be proved that time travel is impossible. Physically, mathematically and logically? I can comment only on the logic. Physics changes, in any case.

This is logically impossible: a single timeline in which an event, e.g., Hitler's birth, both occurs and is prevented from occurring. However, several other time travel scenarios seem to me to be logically possible:

a later event, e.g., the departure of a time machine, causing an earlier event, e.g., the arrival of a time machine;

an effect causing its cause;

a single discontinuous timeline in which the arrival of a time machine prevents the later departure of that time machine;

a timeline in which Hitler was born and a timeline in which Hitler's birth was prevented, these two timelines being related to each other as earlier and later along a second temporal dimension.

But these scenarios probably are physically impossible.

Jack Havig says:

"'All theory says that what I do is totally impossible. It starts by violating the conservation of energy and goes on from there.'"
-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time, V, p. 46.

The conservation of energy is a physical law.

In Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps," when the older Bob Wilson steps out of the Time Gate behind him, the younger Bob Wilson is typing:

"'- nor is it valid to assume that a conceivable proposition is necessarily a possible proposition, even when it is possible to formulate mathematics which describes the proposition with exactness. A case in point is the concept "Time Travel." Time travel may be imagined and its necessities may be formulated under any and all theories of time, formulae which resolve the paradoxes of each theory. Nevertheless, we know certain things about the empirical nature of time which preclude the possibility of the conceivable proposition. Duration is an attribute of consciousness and not of the plenum. It has no Ding an Sicht. Therefore -'"
-Robert Heinlein, "By His Bootstraps" IN Heinlein, The Menace From Earth (London, 1983), pp. 40-87 AT p. 40.

Wilson seems to mean that a logical possibility is not necessarily a physical possibility but how is the psychological nature of duration relevant?

Motion And Time

(This weekend, changing the modem might delay blogging.)

In relativistic physics, the apparent endurance of a three-dimensional body through time is really the extension of a world line along one of the dimensions of space-time. I question the validity of this account. See Space and Time. However, Poul Anderson's accounts of time travel refer to world lines.

From a "world lines" perspective, Jack Havig's three-dimensional body (in There Will Be Time) does not move along time. Any apparent three-dimensional body is merely a cross-section of a static world line. Havig undergoes time dilation, i.e., his bodily and mental processes slow down in relation to everyone else's while, simultaneously and inexplicably, he becomes invisible and intangible.

Havig's account:

a force, operating in at least four dimensions, moves him;

if the force, or field, has an electromagnetic component, then it might catch and carry a few photons, thus explaining his feeble vision while time traveling;

body energy generates and applies the thrusting force - time travel tires;

because of its rest mess, matter, even air, cannot be caught or carried;

resonating genes generate time travel.

Languages II

See Languages.

In Poul Anderson's "Flight to Forever," Martin Saunders, traveling futureward in the time projector, is, in 4100 A.D., given a psychophone which receives emissions from the speech centers of the brain, and beams the corresponding thoughts, greatly amplified, to the listener's brain where they are interpreted in terms of the listener's language. Thus, no communication problems in any subsequent periods.

The Doctor's TARDIS somehow enables its passengers to speak in the appropriate language anywhere or anywhen. It must function as a psychophone.

I want to address issues other than languages but realized that I had omitted these two cases and meanwhile have called back home for an even rusheder lunch. Time travel remains an inexhaustible topic.

Languages

When an Atlantean, a pre-Attila Hun, a medieval Russian and a twentieth century American meet, the American is the only one of the four with the concept, "time travel." The futurian time traveler, Sahir, recognizes Duncan Reid as postindustrial and therefore uses the mentator to learn his language although not to teach Reid the futurian language. Just as the Hun would take days  or weeks to digest an idea like "steam engine," Reid would not know how to use many of the future concepts. After Sahir has died, the four unwilling time travelers use the mentator to learn the most ancient of their four languages because that will be the most useful when they are.

Wardens and Rangers wear a diaglossa in an ear. Time Patrollers speak Temporal between themselves and get other languages imprinted on their brains. Only the mutant time travelers have no recourse but to learn each new language the hard way.

There was going to be more but this morning breakfast is rushed. Laters.

Publication Dates And Reading Orders

I mentioned here that the protagonists of Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time and The Dancer From Atlantis are from "different eras" although only five years separate them - but those years are from 1965 to 1970.

Anderson's Time Patrol series was published from 1955 to 1995;
The Corridors Of Time in 1965;
The Dancer From Atlantis in 1972;
There Will Be Time in 1973;
all of Anderson's Ythrian stories in 1973. See here.

Amazing creativity: quantity as well as quality.

The order of publication shows the author's development but reading orders vary, e.g.:

the Time Patrol series is complete in two long volumes, to be read together;
There Will Be Time comes after the Maurai History;
The Dancer From Atlantis is one of what I call the "3 B.C." (see here and here);
The Corridors Of Time belongs with a few other works that cover more than one period.

The Dancer From Atlantis, Scene-Setting

Duncan Reid is from 1970, five years later than Malcolm Lockridge, a different era. He twice refers to the Moon landings.

The opening page of Chapter Two refers to:

the Dnieper
Pecheneg tribesmen
Constaninople (scroll down)
Grand Prince Yaroslav
Kiev
Lithuanians
kvass

Oleg Vladimirovitch is a trader who invokes "Our Lord," in the style of Nicholas van Rijn. We expect Duncan and Oleg to meet in an earlier era but have not reread that far yet.

A Single Detail

Four works by Poul Anderson each present a different panorama of history and time travel:

in the Time Patrol series, the Patrol opposes individual time criminals, Neldorians, Exaltationists and temporal chaos throughout history;

in The Corridors Of Time, Wardens and Rangers wage war throughout history for control of their future;

in There Will Be Time, Havig's group and the Eyrie contend for control of their future;

in "Flight to Forever," the time projector circumnavigates cosmological time.

The Dancer From Atlantis is not a panorama but a single detail in a fifth scenario:

the anakro, a space-time vehicle, passes over Earth's surface or waters while traveling through time;

time expeditions are limited in number;

a malfunctioning vehicle carries three people from historical times back into prehistory and the novel focuses on what they do then.

Wind, Light And Shadow

Malcolm Lockridge returned to the sea village of Avildaro:

"...on a day when the wind came brawling off the western sea, light and cloud shadow raced each other across the world, waves marched on the bay, and on the puddles from last night's rain. The forest tossed and shouted; stubblefields lay yellow and the meadow grass had become hay. A flight of storks went under the sun, Egypt bound. The air was chill, with smells of salt, smoke, and horses."
-Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER NINETEEN, p. 170.

Colors, sounds and chill air with mixed smells: a four senses scene.

Mythological And Historical Allusions

Not only is Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time comparable to HG Wells' The Time Machine and to other time travel works by Anderson himself; not only have we compared parts of Corridors to passages in Anderson's two very different fantasy works, War Of The Gods and Operation Chaos; not only does Corridors generate discussion of spatiotemporal dimensionality - but also the novel is rich in mythological and historical allusions, e.g.:

"'By all the Maruts!'" (CHAPTER EIGHT, p.71);

"'Maruts snatch you off!'" (CHAPTER NINE, p. 74);

"'By the Maruts...'" (CHAPTER TWENTY, p. 185)

And there is a reference to the Maruts in a quotation from the Rig Veda at the beginning of Anderson's The Dancer From Atlantis.  So who were these Maruts? See here.

Other References
the Sun Chariot of Trundholm
lur horns
Flower Feather
Johan Rantzau
Count Krisstofer
the two Queen Marys
King Henry
Anne Boleyn
her daughter, Elizabeth
Venetians in Crete and the Turkish conquest 

Dimensions, A Realization And Circularity

There were fewer posts yesterday because I drove Aileen and Yossi, daughter and granddaughter, to Foulshaw Moss nature reserve where I drafted the previous post while seated at a picnic table.

If there are only four dimensions and if, as Storm tells Lockridge, a time corridor is:

"'...a tube of force, whose length has been rotated onto the time axis.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER FOUR, p. 33 -

- then it follows that the corridor's temporal axis has been rotated onto one of the three cosmic spatial dimensions.

While escaping from the Warden-controlled village of Avildaro during an attack by an Iberian-British fleet, Lockridge has an Andersonian moment of realization:

"It came to him what he must do. He sat moveless so long that Auri grew frightened."
-CHAPTER TWENTY, p. 190.

He has realized that he himself, twenty five years older, must be leading the attacking fleet. This is the last causal circle in the novel. See Circularity In The Corridors Of Time. Robert Heinlein's circular causality stories are ingenious but lack the historical dimension. See Circular Causality I.

Before escaping, Lockridge sees that the Warden, Hu, has for some reason, run off on his own. This is because Lockridge's followers, attacking the village, have killed all the men that were with Hu. When this happens, Hu flies away by antigravity and calls for Storm. The younger Lockridge sees and hears him doing this. While escaping, Lockridge and his small group see the invasion fleet. That is the moment when Auri sees their younger selves. See They See Themselves.

Dimensional Analysis Of The Time Corridors

We refer to Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time.

Does the temporal dimension within a time corridor correspond to one of the three spatial dimensions outside the corridor or is it a fifth dimension and purely temporal in nature? Argument (i) assumes the latter whereas (ii) is applicable either way and also repeats a point made earlier but I think that this is legitimate in the interests of clarity.

(i) Hypothesis: the familiar four-dimensional continuum endures along a fifth dimension that is not a fourth spatial dimension but a second temporal dimension. A human being, with his three perceived spatial dimensions and one experienced temporal dimension, inhabits a four dimensional cross-section of the five dimensional totality. Because the fifth dimension is temporal, not spatial, any two four dimensional cross-sections are not "above" or "below" but "before" or "after" each other. A time corridor extends along the first temporal dimension and endures, or ages, along the second temporal dimension. Thus, anyone who enters a corridor, spends some time within it, then re-emerges from it, emerges not into his original cross-section/continuum but into a later continuum that is identical with the original except for any changes that he makes, the first such change being his arrival. It would follow from this that, whenever someone travels along a corridor, he leaves behind him a continuum from which he has disappeared and to which he never returns. Clearly, this is not the metaphysic assumed by Anderson. His time travelers always return to the continuum from which they had departed and are unable to alter it. If this is case, then what more complicated metaphysic would account for Anderson's scenario?

(ii) A time corridor extends along the familiar temporal dimension. Therefore, a spatial distance within the corridor corresponds to a temporal interval outside the corridor. Therefore, people entering the corridor from different times outside the corridor should arrive in the corridor with only a spatial distance, not a temporal interval, between them within the corridor. Therefore, they should all meet every time they use the corridor.

Lockridge And Matuchek

Stopped in the time corridor by the mental onslaught of the time wardens, Malcolm Lockridge:

loses all his senses;
becomes a disembodied point in eternity and infinite space;
knows a horrific presence that negates everything - cold, dark, hollow;
is sucked into a vortex;
is not.

In Operation Chaos, Steve Matuchek:

is nowhere and nowhen;
is bodiless in infinite eternal dark, cold and emptiness;
despairs;
is a point in spacetime;
is all that exists;
is under the regard of the egotistic Solipsist;
hears the Solipsist's thoughts, like hearing and drowning in the polar ocean;
feels a forceful malevolence.

Similar experiences in dissimilar contexts.

Aesir And Vanir In Mythology And History

In Poul Anderson's War Of The Gods, the Aesir (gods of sky, wind, weather, sun, moon, stars, the Winterway across heaven and the Northern Lights) and the Vanir, living to the west (gods of earth, sea, harvest, fishery, plow, ship, love, birth, the dark and lawless) make war, then peace.

In Anderson's The Corridors Of Time:

invaders from the east, "...whose patron gods were in the sky...," (CHAPTER SEVEN, p. 59) dislike the forest;

the invaders have "...a clean faith in sun, wind, rain, fire. The darker elements of Nordic paganism would enter later from the old earth cults." (CHAPTER EIGHT, p. 70);

A time traveling Warden persuades the invaders:

"'Sun and Moon, Fire and Water, Air and Earth - why should they not wed, and be worshipped alike?'" (CHAPTER EIGHTEEN, p. 161)

"'...She, Sister to the Sun, walks among us.'" (ibid.)

Further, the Goddess was not:

"...the enemy of Sun and Fire; rather, She was Mother, Wife, and Daughter to the male gods. The Powers desired Their children to be united as They Themselves were." (CHAPTER NINETEEN, p. 169)

Anderson's Time Patrol story, "Star Of The Sea," presents mythological and historical accounts in different sections of a single text.

The Time Machine And The Corridors Of Time

Time is a direction of motion and a future society is based on an extreme pastoral-industrial antithesis.

The Time Machine by HG Wells
Late nineteenth century London;
Morlocks and Eloi;
beyond them, the Further Vision;
speculation about which period the Time Traveler went to.

The Corridors Of Time by Poul Anderson
The United States, 1965;
Wardens and Rangers;
beyond them, the time wardens;
Malcolm Lockridge leads the tribal confederation that builds Stonehenge and discourages human sacrifice during the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age.

Did I mention before that Poul Anderson is Wellsian and is also a superb successor of both Wells and Stapledon?

"Extra People"

"What do you do with your extra people?"
-Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER SEVENTEEN, p. 152.

I discussed this question in The Useless.

The question is wrongly put. Only a manager or a member of an elite would refer to "extra people." That way of thinking can lead to "the termination of human lives without value." People are ends, not means. If there are four people in a car and only three packed lunches, then we say that there are too few lunches, not that there are too many people.

The Ranger masters and the Warden aristocrats have to be overthrown.

Time Travel Within A Time Machine

The idea that I had earlier was as follows. I had already suggested that a corridor built in space might give access to the history of events within a time corridor. See here. But there might be another way to time travel within the corridors.

Wardens and Rangers use time corridors. Their successors, the time wardens, use a torpedo-like vehicle with a transparent cabin, no visible controls and impossibly curved machines or shapes with apparently infinite expansions and regressions. Such a vehicle flies from North America to Denmark, then fire crawls among the curved shapes and the cabin is darkened while a temporal transition occurs. Two differences from a Time Patrol vehicle are that the transition is merely temporal, not spatiotemporal, and is not instantaneous for the travelers. If such a vehicle were flown into a time corridor, would it then be able to time travel within the corridor?

In Time Travel Villains, we imagined the Time Traveler's Time Machine traveling through the space and time within the Master's TARDIS as that vehicle travels through external space-time.

Arrival

We summarized Lockridge's and Auri's arrival in the fortieth century here but neglected to mention that Warden furniture:

"...fitted itself to every changeable contour of their bodies..."
-Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER FOURTEEN, p. 126.

Another example of Future Furniture.

Lockridge will have only one evening with the Wardens before he must embark on his mission to mislead Brann. Anderson is able to move his narrative through many ages, stages and places very quickly in a short novel. Unfortunately, this is the only text where we read about time corridors. I have just had another idea but must go out.

Two Corridors And One Tunnel

In the twenty third century, a tunnel has gates to two time corridors, one stretching back to the seventh century, the other forward to the Warden-Ranger era. They are all in the same place on the Earth's surface, known to us as Bavaria.

In the Warden realm, the anteroom is spacious and richly carpeted with red drapes, many lockers and four green-clad guards, all "...short, squat, flat-nosed and heavy-jawed." (The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER FOURTEEN, p. 124) Genetic engineering is used to produce a subordinate class, ruled by aristocrats.

Rangers might travel along the earlier part of this corridor but cannot possibly use it to return to their own era and emerge from this gate. Storm created a corridor in twentieth century North America, intending to use it to attack the Ranger homeland but Brann, warned by Lockridge, counterattacked down the corridor as soon as it was activated.

This is a unique time travel narrative. I think that the phrase, "corridors of time," has been used metaphorically elsewhere but it is literal here.

Arabic Numerals And Probabilities

(The Corridors Of Time, Part 2, was published in this edition of Amazing.)

The time corridor gates are marked by recognizable Arabic numerals whereas Time Patrol timecycles use post-Arabic.

In the seventh century A.D., Hu and his companions leave the Danish time corridor and fly by antigravity to a German corridor. When Lockridge asks why Storm had not used this route to return home, Hu replies:

"'Use your brain!...After meeting those Rangers in that corridor - you were there, you should know - she estimated too great a probability of doing so again. Only now, when we have Brann, is this a reasonably safe course to follow.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER FOURTEEN, p. 124.

If I travel along a corridor from 600 A.D. to 700 and you travel along the same corridor from 700 to 600, then there is not a certainty but only a probability that we will meet in the corridor. Why? And how is the probability estimated?

"Now" makes sense in terms of the Wardens' experience but why does their having taken Brann prisoner make it safer to use the Danish and German corridors?

Mysticism And Materialism

Arrived in the Warden realm, Malcolm Lockridge consults his diaglossa:

"Religion: here a mystical, ritualistic pantheism, with Her the symbol and embodiment of all that was divine; among the enemy, only a harsh materialistic theory of history."
-Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER FOURTEEN, p. 125.

Some assumptions here: materialism need not be either "only" or "harsh." Let's define some terms. I suggest -

mysticism: intuition of oneness;
materialism: the philosophical theory that being preceded consciousness;
mystification: obscuration.

Mysticism is not mystification and is compatible with materialism. Engels wrote that man is that animal in which nature becomes conscious of itself.

Dialectical materialism is not reductionist but recognizes that new qualities, especially consciousness, emerge from interactions between opposites and from quantitative changes becoming qualitative transformations. The Rangers' philosophy could be liberating instead of harsh. It might even be expressed through pantheistic rituals, yogic exercises and Zen meditation.

Meeting In The Corridors Of Time

Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

The Warden, Hu, and his companions, Malcolm Lockridge and Auri, travel futureward but leave the Danish time corridor in the seventh century A.D.

Hu explains that, at this gate:

Frodhi rules the Danish islands;
the mainland is peaceful;
the Vanir, ancient local gods of earth and water, are still at least co-equal with the imported Aryan Aesir, gods of sky and war;
a little further on, the Rangers will drive out the Wardens and the Viking age will begin;
thus, they would be more likely to encounter Rangers further along the corridor.

Does this make sense? -

few Rangers travel down the corridor from 700 to 600;
more Rangers travel from 800 to 700;
therefore, Hu and his companions would be more likely to meet Rangers between 700 and 800 than between 600 and 700?

But surely, if even one Ranger travels from 700 to 600, then they will meet him when traveling from 600 to 700? In fact, why do they not meet everyone who travels down that section of the corridor, including, where appropriate, their older and younger selves? See here.

They travel at different (second-order) "times"?! Then what determines the "time" at which a traveler passes along the corridor? Why are some travelers there at the same "time" and others not?

In CHAPTER THREE, p. 30, Storm sent the platform on which she and Lockridge had traveled back to its proper station because, if Brann knew that his men's killers had entered the corridor from 1964 and found the platform at the gate by which they had left the corridor, then he would know which time they had gone to - she says. But a traveler or travelers from a different stage of the time war might have used that platform. It seems that, if Storm flees into a time corridor and Brann enters that same corridor in pursuit or to investigate, then the temporal sequence within the corridor follows the temporal sequence of their entrances into the corridor. This allows the novel to present a sequential narrative but does not explain the physics of the corridors.

Throughout Danish History

(Uppsala.)

Poul Anderson, The Corridors of Time, CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

In Denmark in 1827 B.C., Brann captures Storm and Malcolm Lockridge but Lockridge escapes along a time corridor and:

"'...Brann informed his agents throughout Danish history.'" (p. 117)

He can only do this by sending couriers along the corridors.

Suppose, for the sake of simplicity, that one Ranger base exists for three centuries during the period when the Aesir are worshiped in Uppsala and that a second such base exists for two centuries during the period before and after the Protestant Reformation. Does Brann send his couriers to the earliest moments of these bases? He will have had dealings with these and other bases before, in fact will probably have been involved in setting them up. Suppose that his previous dealings with the Uppsala base had occurred during the first fifty years of that base whereas his previous dealings with the Reformation base had been during its first twenty years. Does he dispatch one courier to the fifty first year of the Uppsala base and another to the twenty first year of the Reformation base?

Wardens and Rangers must try to keep their inter-temporal transactions in a coherent order so that they will not interfere with actions or events which, at the current stage of their careers, they regard as completed.

Sensations And Simultaneity

Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

"Sunlight, smells of woodland and smoke and salt water, distant shouts and songs, vanished from his consciousness when he entered the house." (p. 114)

Three senses and a good summary of what is happening in Avildaro.

"'When Lockridge escaped up the corridor...Brann informed his agents throughout Danish history. They are, ah, still searching for our man, no doubt...'" (pp. 116-117)

On the contrary, agents throughout Danish history are not still doing anything. The Rangers' responses to Brann's alert occur before, during or after this piece of dialogue.

Even Wells slips into referring to different times as if they were different places coexisting at the same time:

"He may even now - if I may use the phrase - " (see Now, where I erroneously state that Anderson does not make this mistake.)

The Time War And The Myths

Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER ELEVEN, pp. 96-97.

Rangers arrange invasions by war makers with militant gods;

Wardens keep what was old and remake the invaders;

the tomahawk people obliterate the passage grave cult but Neolithic herdsmen become Bronze Age farmers and seafarers;

the sun changes from a fire spirit to earth's guardian and husband;

Christianity comes and people turn to Mary;

Jehovah returns with the Reformation and the printing press but religion is divided and discredited until people yearn for a deeper faith and, in Lockridge's future, gather on hills;

the Wardens restore the Goddess but are opposed by the Rangers.

Shadows And Myths

(Not a very appropriate cover but there you are.)

Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER ELEVEN, p. 96.

Malcolm Lockridge considers three possibilities:

that the Triple Goddess was an early intuition of Mary who is the actual Queen of Heaven;

that both are shadows of an ultimate reality;

that both are myths.

He adds that:

"What mattered in history was not what men thought but what they felt." (p. 96)

Thinking and feeling are intertwined and should not be dichotomized.

I think that myths are our intuitions of reality. The Triple Goddess explicitly means youth, motherhood and age - the cyclical process of life.

Lockridge reflects that, although the Indo-Europeans impose a patriarchal pantheon, the old ones endure:

Dyaush Pitar becomes Thor who becomes St Olaf;
Odin becomes a troll;
Frey becomes St Erik;
She becomes the Virgin;
sprites, hobgoblins, leprechauns and mermaids, too much in the world to be called gods, are signs of the mystery of life.

A mermaid became a children's story, then a statue in a modern setting.

Spirits Of Earth And Water

(Viborg, Denmark.)

Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER ELEVEN.

In Viborg, 1535 A.D., Jesper Fledelius makes some fine distinctions. Being, as he sees it, a good Christian man, he rejects the Lutheran heresy, Satan and the false gods in the chronicles of Saxo Grammaticus but believes that peasants may appeal to the spirits of earth and water without grave sin.

Lockridge reflects that the Neolithics have "...wholeness of spirit..." and are:

"...one with earth and sky and sea in a way that those who set the gods apart from themselves, or who denied any gods, could never be." (p. 96)

What is it to deny gods? No longer believing that they literally exist, we must nevertheless acknowledge that imagination, myth, art and literature are essential to humanity. We would not be who or what we are without the Homeric and Eddaic gods, also without Hamlet and other major figures in literature. Does anyone deny this and think that human beings could have libraries and bookshops full of history and science but nothing else? Religion and fiction are a continuum. Readers who prefer realistic fiction have to acknowledge that libraries also contain speculative fiction, fantasy, myths, fairy tales and theology. See Wreathed Horn.

There will probably be more about this passage in The Corridors Of Time.

Brann Replies

See A Simplistic Dichotomy And An Irreconcilable Antithesis.

Brann the Ranger asks whether these things are evil:

the science that ends drudgery, famine and childhood diseases and sends men beyond the moon;

the Constitution of the United States;

reason, which alone differentiates men from animals -

- and:

"'Do you seriously think this earthward-looking, magic-muttering, instinct-bound, orgiastic faith of the Goddess can ever rise above itself?'"
-Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER EIGHT, p. 66.

That reminded me of this passage:

"Where the West had soared from the rock of Earth like a sequoia, the Soviets spread like lichens over the planet, tightening their grip, satisfied to be at the bases of the pillars of sunlight the West had sought to ascend."
-James Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), p. 238.

Soaring or Earthbound - the same conflict in a different fictional future.

Three Facts

These facts impressed me when I learned them:

that the Buddha was not a strange god but a compassionate man;

that the Norse gods are doomed;

that a Trojan prince was an ancestor of the founders of Rome.

I learned the first two from an encyclopedia at home and the third from a Latin class at school.

Poul Anderson:

presents sympathetic treatments of religious practitioners, including two Buddhists, Adzel and Trygve Yamamura;

wrote a lot about the Norse gods;

wrote a lot about the Western and Eastern Roman Empires and their fictional successor, the Terran Empire;

also addressed many other themes.

Thus, lessons learned early in life were good preparations for an appreciation of Poul Anderson's works.

Auri In The Underworld

Auri is not amazed by her experience of the time corridor:

"But then, to her all these wonders were equally wonderful, and, in fact, no more mysterious than rain, wind, birth, death, and the wheel of the seasons."
-Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER NINE, p. 81.

"...she accepted everything as it came to her, though she kept a fox's alertness: an attitude that Zen masters might envy." (p. 83)

Except that they would not envy!

When Lockridge says that they will tell people in the sixteenth century that Auri is his wife, she takes this to mean that she is his wife and he has to invent a reason why they will not consummate their marriage yet.

Again, having moved along a corridor, they emerge at the same place on the Earth's surface but the forest is gone and there is the ruin of a burned cottage. Same place, different time, much closer to Lockridge's present.

Temporal Passengers

HG Wells' Time Traveler travels alone. There is room for only one on the Time Machine.

Poul Anderson's mutant time travelers have to travel alone. They cannot carry anyone else with them.

The Doctor's TARDIS (see image), bigger inside than out, can carry an army and the Doctor always travels with an untrained and unqualified companion.

Two can sit on a Time Patrol timecycle and sometimes larger models or box-like time shuttles are used. When Everard and Van Sarawak escape from a divergent timeline, the Venusian's arm remains around Deirdre's waist.

When Malcolm Lockridge escapes into a time corridor, he must take Auri with him. When the anakro space-time vehicle malfunctions, it pulls people from different periods with it through time.

Thus an adventure begins - or continues - when accident or circumstance transports a character from his here and now to an exotic there and then.

"I don't think we're in Kansas anymore..."

Sky And Earth

"Sky Father's worshippers still feared the earth gods for whom, further inland, a human being was devoured every harvest."
-Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER NINE, p. 75.

This is a transitional stage in the history of religion. Sky Father is becoming the one God and the earth gods are becoming demons.

Hindu gods and demons are devas and asuras, respectively. When two Aryan groups parted company, each regarded the other's gods as demons. Thus, devas became devils and the one God of Zoroastrianism is Ahura Mazda.

Poul Anderson's time travelers, both in his Time Patrol series and in The Corridors Of Time, are able to immerse themselves in prehistoric periods to an extent that is impossible for historians living at a later date. See "Manse Everard's Religious Experiences," here. Although Everard wants to escape from the alienness of Cyrus' period, many later scholars would welcome the opportunity to experience it in full.

The Aryans

The local war band that attacks Avildaro (see here) is part of:

"...the northward-thrusting edge of that huge wave, more cultural than racial, of Indo-European-speaking warriors which had been spreading from southern Russia in the past century or two. Elsewhere they were destined to topple civilizations: India, Crete, Hatti, Greece would go down in ruins before them, and their languages and religions and way of life would shape all Europe. But hitherto, in sparsely populated Scandinavia, there had not been great conflict between the native hunters, fishers, and farmers, and the chariot-driving immigrant herdsmen."
-Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER SIX, p. 55.

Anderson does not use the word, "Aryans." We know that they will conquer Scandinavia. Their sky gods will become not only the Vedic pantheon and the Olympians but also the Aesir. Odin is a character in Anderson's heroic fantasies and the Time Patrol must later counteract a resurgence of Goddess-worship. If the Wardens and Rangers could be transported to the Time Patrol timeline, then they would side with the Exaltationists and the Patrol, respectively.

Are The Gods Miserly Or Generous?

I have quoted Manse Everard's remark that the gods are a miserly lot five, now six, times. See here.

Here is Malcolm Lockridge's equivalent reflection:

"Life was physically harder in some places, harder on the spirit in others, and sometimes it destroyed both. At most, the gods gave only a little happiness; the rest was mere existence. Taken altogether, he didn't think they were less generous here and now than they had been to him."
-Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER SIX, p. 53.

"The gods" are a way of reflecting on "life."

Two friends that I have met in Pagan moots:

Nygel, a Wiccan high priest, refers to "the gods";

Andrea says that his deity is Fortuna, personified chance.

People personified external forces in order to get a handle on them and placate them. However, Fortuna is to be respected but never prayed to or entreated. Thus (I suggest), her temple is a half-way house between polytheism and atheism. She favors the brave - which Poul Anderson's heroes are.

Known And Unknown

Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER FIVE, pp. 43-44.

In 1827 B.C., Storm and Lockridge visit Avildaro, a fishing village on the Limjford which is open in this period. In an invariant timeline, a time traveler can know something, although not everything, about the immediate future:

because this station has not been considered important enough to scout intensively, Storm does not know what will happen in and around Avildaro this year;

however, reconnaissance has established that there is no large scale use of energy devices in this millennium, which means that her enemies, the Rangers, are not present;

a survey party from Ireland, where the time portals are a century out of phase from the ones in Denmark, has confirmed that Avildaro survives and is even more important a century hence;

therefore, Storm mistakenly feels safe in approaching Avildaro.

A single Ranger who has been tipped off that she is there will lead a local war band and capture her.

A Different Language

Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER FIVE, pp. 40-42.

The attached image is from modern Copenhagen whereas Chapter Five is set in 1827 B.C. but there may be a connection if mermaids are related to the sea goddess. See below.

The diaglossa, a molecular encoder placed in the ear, powered by body heat and meshing its output with the nerve flow of the brain, gives Lockridge an artificial memory center including a language which:

has twenty words for water;
can express concepts like "mass," "government" and "monotheism" only with elaborate circumlocutions;
has very different concepts of "cause," "time," "self" and "death."

We need to spend some time thinking in such a language before returning to our own.

She of the Wet Locks eats land and men but gives shining fish, oyster, seal and porpoise to those who serve Her. She sounds like the goddess of Veleda in the Time Patrol story, "Star Of The Sea." 

The Physics Of The Corridors Of Time II

See the previous post and also an earlier post here.

Storm and Lockridge:

travel along the corridor at an estimated thirty miles an hour for less than half an hour;

travel from 1964 A.D. to 1827 B.C. (see The First Moment).

Do these distances match up with what Storm says about a conversion factor of "'...roughly thirty-five days per foot'"? (CHAPTER FOUR, p. 33) I am not going to try to calculate it.

It is curiously appropriate that burial mounds are used as gates to other times. Some people led through one of the time corridors believe that they are descending into the underworld and rising into another world.

The Physics Of The Corridors Of Time

Copied from Poul Anderson And Time Travel:

In The Corridors of Time by Poul Anderson, warring factions called Wardens and Rangers walk or drive along corridors that have been rotated onto the temporal axis. Before entering a corridor, time travellers leaving different periods are separated by temporal intervals. After entering the corridor, they are, theoretically, separated only by spatial distances. Some will be near enough to see each other. Others will pass when moving along the corridor. Therefore, they should encounter and interact with each other and with their later and older selves on their first attempt to use the corridor.
However, such an outcome would complicate the story uncontrollably, especially since the factions are at war. An instant pitched battle inside the corridor would ensure that most individuals did not survive their first attempt to travel along the corridor and therefore never did re-enter it as older versions of themselves. Usually, however, the characters use the corridors without meeting each other. The only explanation given is:
"Duration occurs there too, but on a different plane…" (60)
The twentieth century protagonist, Lockridge, standing in a corridor with a companion, thinks:
"At any moment, someone might enter through some other gate and spy them. (Just what did that mean, here in this time which ran outside of time? He’d think about it later.)" (61)
If he does think about it, he does not do so in the novel. When Lockridge, pursued by Rangers, enters one of the corridors, his pursuers arrive in the corridor not a short distance away from him but a few moments after him. Thus, the order of events in the time "on a different plane" in the corridor follows the order of events in the familiar time outside the corridor. Again, this is convenient for story telling purposes. Lockridge would have been apprehended if his pursuers had arrived simultaneously with him.
If, in Lockridge’s experience, his first journey along a particular corridor starts from the twentieth century and his second journey along the same corridor starts from the fourteenth, which of the journeys will an observer inside the corridor witness first? We must imagine not an observer moving steadily along the corridor from the past towards the future but instead a stationary observer able to perceive the entire length of the corridor simultaneously.
As in the Time Patrol series, Anderson is good at writing his way around potential complications so that the reader is rarely troubled by them. The question in the preceding paragraph occurred to me only when writing about The Corridors of Time. Another potential problem arises when we are told that:
"Emergence cannot be precise, because the human body has a finite width equivalent to a couple of months. That was why we had to hold hands coming through – so we would not be separated by weeks." (60)
The Einsteinian space-time equivalence is not one body width to two months or "thirty-five days per foot" but one hundred and eighty six thousand miles to one second. (62)
Thor Wald, explains:
"Assuming, to keep the figures simple, that Robin lives to be a century old, he would then be roughly a foot thick, two feet wide, five feet five inches in height, and five hundred and eighty-six trillion, five hundred and sixty-nine billion, six hundred million miles in duration." (45)
Thus, Anderson’s corridors that endure for six thousand years would have to extend for six thousand light years in space before they were rotated into time but, in this novel, Anderson avoids mentioning Einsteinian space-time. If space-time equivalence is valid, then the simplest theory is that one of our three space dimensions becomes a corridor’s time dimension. It should be possible to construct a spatial corridor that allows entry to any period of the internal history of one of the corridors. This is another complication that Anderson does not need for the story that he wants to tell so it is not mentioned.

The First Moment

"The fact that he was really here, now, personally, stabbed into him."
-Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER FIVE, p. 38.

"...here, now..." is pre-Danish Denmark,  1827 B.C.

"This was the first moment when the reality of time travel struck home to Everard..." (see Reality And Interpretation)

There has to be a first moment for everything and Poul Anderson makes it seem very real in both these cases.

Follow The Texts

I am about to sign off until some time tomorrow but, before I do, just look at how much we get out of Poul Anderson's texts, from Danish geography to medieval history. I happen to be interested in social philosophy but we discuss it here because Anderson does, not because I have brought it in as a hobbyhorse.

New points of interest can be found on multiple rereadings so, having just reread There Will Be Time and wanting to stay with the theme of historical and futuristic time travel, I have re-engaged with The Corridors Of Time and so far have read only as far as Chapter Four of twenty one.

Must go: meeting the guys in the Gregson.

A Simplistic Dichotomy And An Irreconcilable Antithesis

The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER FOUR, p. 34.

Storm's take on the Wardens versus Rangers conflict:

Life as imagined against life as it is;
plan against organic development;
control against freedom;
overriding rationalism against animal wholeness;
the machine against the living flesh.

People on the wrong side:

Draco
Diocletian
Torquemada
Calvin
Locke
Voltaire
Napoleon
Marx
Lenin
Nietzsche
Arguellas
the author(s) of the Jovian Manifesto

Also wrong: the burning of the Confucian Willow Books (?).

Storm sure knows how to present a one-sided argument. When I was reading The Corridors Of Time for the very first time and before I had reached the description of a Ranger city, I thought that the Rangers were right and the Wardens wrong but, of course, the point is that both sides are one-sided.

A Straight Corridor Beginning And Ending At The Same Place

Storm and Lockridge, now on foot and in daylight, approach a dolmen on a small hill. Lockridge knows that:

"...the chamber within...had once been buried under heaped earth, of which only this mound was left...."
-Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER THREE, p. 24.

When Storm has raised a circle of earth, they descend a spiral ramp, Storm closing the entrance behind them. They enter a long room and pass through an immaterial veil into an impossibly long corridor along which they travel on a moving platform at an estimated thirty miles per hour. After about half an hour, they leave the platform, step through another veil, pass through another long room, up another spiral ramp and out another turf trapdoor. It is night.

Anderson writes that:

"...the moundside now covered the dolmen, up to the capstone, with a rude wooden door beneath." (p. 31)

- as if we are to understand that it is the same dolmen - which it is. Time travel has occurred by a much more roundabout route than in either the Time Patrol series or There Will Be Time.

Domestication And Freedom

Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER THREE.

The science fiction starts on p. 24, the eighteenth page of the text, when a circle of earth, ten feet wide, twenty thick, rises straight into the air in response to an instrument held by Storm.

There have been more hints of her futurity. She referred to "'...your current work on the genetic code.'" (CHAPTER TWO, p. 20)

Obviously Lockridge is not working on the genetic code! She predicts that:

"'...it will be possible to know what a man is fit for before he is born.'" (ibid.)

Storm refers not to the full development of the potential within each individual human being but only to the subordination of the bulk of the population within a hierarchical society with herself as one of the goddesses. Lockridge says that he prefers everyone to be born free. I agree with him but we will be freer in a society where understanding of genetics and psychology is used in the service of individual enrichment and development. I want something like Anderson's earlier Psychotechnic Institute, not manipulating mass psychology but sharing its knowledge and acknowledging when it is still ignorant.

When Storm says:

"'Ninety per cent of this species are domestic animals by nature.'" (ibid.)

- she sounds like Nicholas van Rijn at the end of "The Master Key." See Philosophy And Fiction IV. However, van Rijn wants to sell to the masses, not to domesticate them.

Copenhagen And Roskilde

The Merman's Children is historical fantasy whereas The Corridors Of Time combines historical and futuristic sf. They share some place names, including Copenhagen and Roskilde. See:

The Merman's Children, Book Four, Chapters IV-V
Denmark

I was very impressed by Storm Darroway's and Malcolm Lockridge's long car journey through Denmark and still more that I had been able to summarize it in a single post. I thought that it had required several.

Storm and Lockridge are about to embark on a journey through time but first we are treated to their journey through Denmark. In fact, both of these characters are dead before the novel begins. They will travel to before the Bronze Age and stay then. We bring such knowledge with us to any subsequent rereading of the book. 

The Norm Of The Universe

Storm Darroway asks why:

"'...people in this age think their own impoverished lives must be the norm of the universe?'"
-Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time, CHAPTER TWO, p. 16.

Such an arrogant aristocrat would think that that anyone else's life was impoverished. Wardens have something in common with Exaltationists although the chief Ranger, Brann, physically resembles Merau Varagan. That phrase, "...in this age...," is a clue to Storm's origin.

Storm's norms:

we are built of clouds of energy;
our sun could consume Earth;
other suns could swallow ours;
our ancestors hunted mammoth, rowed across oceans and died in battle;
civilization is at the edge of oblivion;
our bodies fight hostile germs, entropy and time;
our ancestors knew that all that could be done was to meet the end of the world and of the gods bravely.

Science fiction reminds us of our real place in the universe.

The Corridors Of Time, Chapter Two

Poul Anderson presents an excellent short guide to Copenhagen. What I skipped over in that previous post was his description of the people, many cycling to work and not looking beaten like American commuters:

"...portly placid men..." (p. 13) (for reference, see here);
young men wearing business suits or student caps;
girls with blowing blonde hair;
everyone obviously enjoying life.

Storm has allowed Lockridge three weeks relaxation in Copenhagen between the ordeal of his trial and whatever task lies ahead. We will soon know but look how how much Anderson gives us first.

Recruitment Interviews

Malcolm Lockridge's initial encounter with Storm Darroway (see here) is Lockridge's equivalent of Manse Everard's conversation with Mr Gordon, the Time Patrol recruiter:

there is an unplaceable foreignness about Gordon's incongruous facial features;

Gordon's assistant is white-skinned, hairless, heavily accented, expressionless and of indeterminate age;

the letters and numbers on a meter are unrecognizable and do not belong to 1954 A.D.;

looking back, maybe Everard was already starting to realize the truth.

At the end of his interview, Everard is told that his job will be to patrol time whereas Storm tells Lockridge only to follow written instructions that he will receive and that they will meet again in Denmark. He will not be told the truth until Chapter Four.

The Corridors Of Time, Chapter One

Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time (Frogmore, St Albans, Herts), 1975, CHAPTER ONE, pp. 7-13. (For the cover of this edition, see the attached image.)

Although the title, author's name and back cover blurb tell us that this novel is science fiction, the opening chapter, of twenty one, merely hints:

Malcolm Lockridge cannot tell where Storm Darroway is from;
she reminds him of Cretan images of the Goddess;
he cannot place her accent;
he wonders why someone with her appearance has an Anglo-Saxon name;
she uses the unfamiliar, italicized, term "slogg" (p.12);
behind her hair, he sees "...a tiny, transparent button in her left ear." (ibid.)

All of these details will matter later but, by the end of this chapter, we might be reading a contemporary novel. The events described in such novels occur while, in some sf novels, time travelers move among us. The reference to a "...Midwestern springtime..." (p. 8) reminds us of Time Patrolman Manse Everard although, this time, we are not in the Time Patrol timeline.

Redcoats

A whole bunch of stuff just came together and there is always an Anderson angle on everything.

Bryan Talbot tells us that John Paul Jones was deterred from approaching Sunderland when he sighted a small army of redcoats - which were really fishermen's wives in red shawls awaiting their husbands' return.

Cue for a Time Patrol story: a Time Patrolman knows that Jones will be deterred by sighting redcoats but also finds that there are no redcoats to hand so he tells the wives that their husbands' boats are returning...

The Time Patrol can be inserted at almost any point in history. They must ensure that Harold of England defeats Harald Hardrada but is defeated by William of Normandy etc. That series could have been continued indefinitely but Poul Anderson had a lot more other things to write.