“Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits -- and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!”
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits -- and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!”
-copied from here.
In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series:
Stane's "Heart's Desire" is well-meant;
the Neldorians' is self-serving;
the Exaltationists' is mischievous -
- but all are criminal according to the Patrol.
I have a lot of sympathy with Stane. Would a Patrolman who arrived in a genuinely more peaceful and prosperous timeline really want to restore our twentieth century?
(Blogging can be like jazz. Expect improvisation.)
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
But would Stane's attempt at interfering with Anglo/Saxon history truly have led to such a genuinely peaceful and prosperous future? I have very strong doubts of that! Moreover, what of the Prime Directive all Patrol agents were sworn to obey: to preserve that line of history leading to the Danellians? After all, the Danellian era is supposed to be also peaceful and prosperous (even if the Danellians themselves sometimes worried agents like Manse Everard).
Ad astra! Sean
The problem is that history is a chaotic system; you can't predict the consequences of your actions. We have to try, or be paralyzed, but altering the past would have utterly unpredictable consequences.
And they might be better for a while, and then worse later.
The Time Patrol history is very, very long -- there are good and bad periods in it; try to shorten one, and you risk aborting the later good ones too. (Everard points this out -- that someone might try to avoid the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, but thereby abort the Venusian Renaissance -- a clever touch.)
I tried to bring that out in the BLACK CHAMBER books -- the changes from one event fan out and produce other, unpredictable ones. A person is in a different place because they stopped to read a newspaper about a different American election, which delays someone else, which upsets someone else so they carelessly drop a crate of an experimental insecticide...
So you get a twentieth century dominated by "world states" the way the geopoliticians expected. Hitler dies obscurely in WW1 and there's no Second World War and no Holocaust, but there are other disasters and massacres that didn't take place in our history... but Jim Crow in the US is ended much earlier... it all balances out in the end.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, you brought out more clearly what I told Paul: one person's actions are as likely as not to have BAD as well as good consequences.
But I don't really like EVERYTHING Theodore Roosevelt was doing in the BLACK CHAMBER books. Because his ideas and policies were undermining the old limited gov't ideal of the US Constitution. So, I can see why the Republican Party in our 1912 basically THREW the election that year to Woodrow Wilson, who had many of the same kind of bad ideas as TR, but was far less competent and hence less likely to successfully implement them. But that in turn led to the bungling Wilson making a botch of the US' role in WW I and the Versailles peace settlement. But no one could have predicted that in 1912!
I did wonder why you didn't have Horst in THEATER OF SPIES tasking Corporal You Know Who with smashing the radar in the German airship Luz and Ciara and James had managed to steal from the German air base. Horst already had enough soldiers to pursue the Black Chamber agents after the airship was forced down. Detailing one man to smash the radar while the airship was unoccupied makes sense!
Ad astra! Sean
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