Cross-Temporal Comparisons

From tomorrow, we will be at a holiday venue near here for six nights and I will be hoping for an Internet connection. Without that, the blog will revert to "...the night and chaos of time..." (see here) for a while.

Let us compare and contrast:

the Time Traveler on the Time Machine;

a Time Patrolman on a timecycle;

the Doctor in the TARDIS;

Martin Saunders in the time projector.

 

First, the Time Traveler and the Doctor are universally recognized whereas Anderson's characters are anything but. However, they are eminently comparable.

The Time Traveler visits AD 802,701 and successive periods of the "Further Vision" and returns to the late nineteenth century.

The Time Patrolmen that we know visit mainly prehistory and history but also present a patchy future history. See The Time Patrol Timeline.

Martin Saunders visits many periods of a very long future history before returning to 1973 around the circle of time. See "Flight To Forever" Timeline, Part I, here, and Part II, here.

The Doctor visited first the Terrestrial Stone Age and secondly the planet Skaro, inhabited by Daleks and Thals, and thereafter, for many seasons, alternated between historical and future or extraterrestrial settings. Thus, a future history could have been constructed although one of the writers, Terrance Dicks, told some of us, including Tom Disch, in a pub conversation during the Lancaster Literature Festival years ago that consistency was not maintained. Doctor Who, like Star Trek and Superman, has untapped potential.