Gratillonius is the last King of Ys;
Adzel studies on Earth;
the Time Patrol guards the Danellian timeline;
the Time Traveler twice traverses 2020;
the Last Men observe the Great War;
time corridors enter the 20th century...
All fictional events are activated or reactivated in the minds of their readers and we imagine a Limbo for works that are out of print and forgotten.
However, time travel is perennial. We know that Ys was inundated and that Adzel had a career after he had completed his studies but - the Time Traveler travels now; the Time Patrol offices, 1890-1910, administered the modern period until 2000 and later offices administer the period from 2000...
In a different sense, they are still with us.
2 comments:
Note that Poul's time travel stories -- the TIME PATROL, CORRIDORS OF TIME, even THERE WILL BE TIME -- are carefully nonspecific about the immediate future; this keeps them from dating rapidly.
That was particularly deft in THERE WILL BE TIME; when the narrator talks about the "final war" he says Havig has told him it isn't the east-vs.-west slugfest that people in the Cold War anticipated, and that the causes may well have been ecological as much as political. That's very well done -- he -has- to deal with the immediate future, the late 20th and early 21st centuries, but does so in a way that isn't dependent on predicting, eg., who's President or what countries are rivals in the international sphere.
That makes those series different from the Psychotechnic ones, which were dependent on a WWIII happening soon (in the 1950's) and along the USA/USSR lines then anticipated.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree with you on how skillfully Anderson wrote THERE WILL BE TIME. But, that dratted Introduction he prefaced the book with had me half convinced for years and years it was REAL. I kept uneasily waiting to see if those ambiguous hints he gave us were coming true!
Ad astra! Sean
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