I argue that it is nonsense when Volstrup thinks that everything around him and he himself could cease ever having been. Why should that happen? Does anything like it ever happen anywhere or anywhen else in the Time Patrol series? Poul Anderson wrote more carefully than that. Such things do happen in some other time travel narratives which are logically unsalvageable.
However, in more general terms, the idea that the actions of a time traveler can conceivably prevent an entire world from coming into existence or from ever having been is part of the mythology of a certain tradition in sf. It makes sense to show a time traveler fearing such an outcome even if his way of formulating the thought is incoherent. Volstrup has just been put under the greatest possible stress for a Time Patrol agent, realizing that he has lived into a divergent timeline. At the same set of four-dimensional coordinates in the Danellian timeline, the original Volstrup has just heard or is about to hear the expected outcome of the battle of Rignano and is unconcerned. History is proceeding as it should. He can have no idea that, in another direction, an alternative version of himself has heard the worst possible news.
For other related reflections on Volstrup, see here.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
But we do see Patrol agents like Keith Denison saying in "Brave To Be A King" that the aberrant timeline where the infant Cyrus the Great WAS murdered and which he and Manse then prevented from happening, never happened. That would be another example of the kind of sloppy thinking you criticized Volstrup for doing. And Manse seems to have thought the same way about the aberrant Carthaginian timeline he "aborted" in "Delenda Est."
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Yes. This started with Wells' THE TIME MACHINE. I love the stories but I also engage critically with what the characters say about their time traveling.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I noticed that! And the massive analysis you give us about the Time Patrol stories. How can we know for sure how is right, you or those characters who thought "deleted" universes, somehow, never even existed at all?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
We cannot know for sure in the sense of anyone adjudicating the matter. Each of us can only think it through logically. There is definitely a contradiction in saying that the timeline that we are in now might turn out not to exist.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And it's because of these commentaries of yours that I've finally noticed such points, instead of simply reading (AND enjoying the stories). But, Anderson did write, in part, in a reply to to one of my letters to him, if I was"making too much" of some of his stories I had been discussing in detail. However, he immediately said he understood the pleasure many readers take in such analyzes, citing the similar zeal many fans have for the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Ad astra! Sean
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