"The sensible thing was to stick a knife in him. But moonlight fell on his face, and he was quite young, and whatever his age, Everard bore him no grudge."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), PART TWO, 209 B. C., p. 93.
The sensible thing? Andersonian heroes do not knife young guards but Everard is not just an Andersonian hero. He is also a Time Patrolman. The Patrol recruits from a million years of history and its leadership is not human. How many Patrol agents would have done the sensible thing? And how many of them are in the SS or the Gestapo ensuring that the Holocaust occurs on schedule? Someone could write Time Patrol installments from a very different moral perspective.
In "The Only Game in Town," Everard learns that the Patrol itself changes history when necessary. In The Shield Of Time, he learns that the real purpose of the Patrol is to counteract temporal chaos. What other lessons remain to be learned?
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
More exactly, Andersonian heroes don't kill without there first being a NEED to do so.
Yes, a very "special," and distasteful kind of agent would be needed for infiltrating the SS/Gestapo and MVD/KGB to make sure the Holocaust and the Gulags occurred as recorded.
Ad astra! Sean
Actually, Michael Scott Rohan's "Spiral" books deal with precisely that in the later volumes. Mild Spoiler: there's an organization sorta-kinda analogous to the Time Patrol, if of more limited scope, and the hero ultimately comes to interact with it.
I found the first book a bit wordy but I think that I ought to persevere with the series.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Do you mean my suggestion that some Time Patrol agents infiltrating the SS and KGB would be very distasteful persons? And analogous organizations by other writers.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment