Temporal Vehicles

Poul Anderson first calls the Time Patrol vehicles "hoppers" and later settles on the term, "timecycles," but still sometimes uses "hopper" and even the Wellsian term, "time machine." That term is entirely down to Wells. People no longer refer to aircraft as "flying machines."

The Wellsian term is particularly appropriate in the Time Patrol series because the Patrol vehicles are like improved, streamlined, mass-produced later models of the Time Traveler's  nineteenth-century prototype contraption. The Patrol models are infinitely faster, with zero duration between departure and arrival, and they are also space-time vehicles which is what the Time Traveler had originally envisaged.

Anderson dispenses with vehicles in The Corridors Of Time and There Will Be Time but each of these novels has other parallels with Wells' work. In the first, time is described as a fourth dimension and, in the second, Havig's experience of time travel is similar to the Time Traveler's. In Anderson's The Dancer From Atlantis, the space-time vehicle, the anakro, (scroll down) moves in a great circle across the Earth's surface whereas, in Anderson's "Flight to Forever," the time projector, like Wells' Time Machine, remains stationary on the Earth's surface and is physically moved in the future so that it returns to a different position in the present.

Thus, we compare five works by Anderson to one by Wells.