-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 3, p. 17.
Imagine if, in 1954, you knew the outline of world history until 2020 and beyond. Anderson got it right about a tragic era. This passage really is about Everard interacting with the future even though we are not told any details of the next few decades.
Brian Aldiss addresses such issues in his Introduction to James Blish's The Quincunx Of Time:
"The future will no more understand our compulsion to stockpile enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over than we understand why the Egyptians built the pyramids.
"'You'll know the future, but not what it means,' says one of the characters in Quincunx. 'The farther into the future you travel with the machine, the more incomprehensible the messages become...'
"One of the many original features of this novel is that it does actually concern the future. It catches our attention because we see in it a mirror of the present day. Blish was after something different. Quincunx is like few other fictions, and does not resemble closely anything else Blish wrote."
-Brian Aldiss, "PEEP: An Introduction to THE QUINCUNX OF TIME" IN James Blish, The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1983), pp. 6-10 AT p. 7.
Other ways that time travel affects a person's perceptions of the present:
"That Everard had been recruited in New York, A.D. 1954, and Nomura in San Francisco, 1972, ought to make scant difference. The upheavals of that generation were bubble pops against what had happened before and what would happen after."
-Poul Anderson, "Gibraltar Falls" IN Time Patrol, pp. 113-128 AT p. 114.
"'Fashions come and go.'"
-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth," IN Time Patrol, pp. 333-465 AT 2319, p. 375.
"'Yes, you would stay a polite country boy, wouldn't you? Roving through history, you'd miss out on the social changes in your homeland.'"
-Poul Anderson, "The Year of the Ransom," IN Time Patrol, pp. 641-735 AT 23 May 1987, p.716.
"'...when one knows what lies ahead in history, one's incentive to follow the daily news is slight.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), PART TWO, 1987 A. D., p. 71.
5 comments:
Actually, stockpiles of nuclear weapons are the most probable reason we didn't have World War Three.
People -start- wars because they think they can win them and achieve their victory conditions. They may be wrong, or proceeding from faulty information, or be indulging in wishful thinking, but they're not just doing it for the sake of doing it. It's a means of political action.
If war means "we blow up the world", then people are unlikely to start one.
This is why industrialized Great Powers haven't fought each other straight-up since 1945 -- the first time nuclear weapons were used, and the last, so far. This is not a coincidence.
'tis the Peace of the Mushroom Cloud.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
But how long can the Peace of the Mushroom Cloud last before some fanatical or crazed despot does use nukes? MAD can only work if the leaders of hostile powers armed with nukes are MUTUALLYY convinced making a bid for a decisive victory comes with unacceptable costs.
Ad astra! Sean
I am worried that, if nukes remain around indefinitely, then one will eventually be used. A terrorist attack on a major city...
Paul: oh, that will probably happen eventually. I don't find a large-scale nuclear exchange between Great Powers at all likely, though. It's too hard to convince yourself it will work.
The mechanism for persuading yourself would probably be something on the order of imagining that the confrontation (say, between China and the US over Taiwan) could be contained because the other side is bluffing.
That's not probable, IMHO, but possible.
;sKaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
I agree that, as of now, it's more likely for terrorists to set off nukes than for Great Powers to so mismanage a conflict that a nuclear exchange happens. Possible, but not probable, as Stirling said.
Another possibility would be a crazed despot like Kim Jong Un of N Korea to sell or give nukes to terrorists.
It's a pity Anderson never revised and updated his book THERMONUCLEAR WARFARE to take into account such possibilities, some of which were becoming plain in the 1990's.
Ad astra! Sean
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