An Increased Rate Of Existence

Poul Anderson, "Welcome" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 58-70. 

Poul Anderson excels at formulating new scientific rationales for sf cliches like telepathy, time travel, FTL etc. In From Time Patrol To Past Times, I described "Welcome" as dealing not with time travel but with temporal stasis. However, when Barlow arrives in 2497:

"...he had departed [the twentieth century] less than half an hour ago, as far as his conscious mind knew." (p. 61)

This is not stasis but dilation although it is achieved not by relativistic space travel but by "'...a jolt of energy...'" (p. 60)

The rationale occupies a single phrase and a single sentence and serves no narrative purpose other than to establish the premise of a modern man thrust into a future society. Suspended animation would have served the same purpose. HG Wells had time travel in The Time Machine and suspended animation in The Sleeper Wakes. Robert Heinlein had both in The Door Into Summer.

Barlow has been in a "...superenergy state." (p. 58) We are not told whether he has been enclosed in some kind of visible chamber or device or whether he has been invisible and intangible as Wells' Time Traveler and his Time Machine and Anderson's Jack Havig unaccountably are.

Barlow's explanation is entirely for the reader's benefit, not for that of his reception committee:

"'Travel into the past, an obvious absurdity. All I did was give myself a jolt of energy, a vector along the time axis rather than through space, and so increased my rate of existence several millionfold....But you know all about that.'" (p. 60)

I do not know about it! If he increased the rate of his psychophysical processes several millionfold, then surely he would age and die almost instantly, not experience less than half an hour between 1997 and 2497? Wells' describes such acceleration in "The New Accelerator." Wells also contradicts himself, in The Time Machine, by stating first that everything and everyone does not move but extends along the temporal dimension but secondly that the Time Traveler accelerates in that direction whereas in fact he does the opposite of accelerating. He slows down his bodily and mental processes in comparison with the external universe. See Time Travel And Poul Anderson.

A further difficulty with Barlow's rationale is that his reference to a temporal rather than a spatial vector seems to have no connection with his acceleration.