Monday 24 May 2021

A Third Threat Averted

In The Shield Of Time, PART SIX, "Amazement of the World," near the end of Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, a quantum threat to the Danellian timeline is averted when the Patrol eliminates - new time travel concept - a personal causal nexus. More significantly, the meaning of the Patrol is revealed. More than just a police force, this organization is the stabilizing element in a chaotic reality.

Climactic threat aversion is common to two of Anderson's future history series. See Vast Conflicts. We compared the inhabited galaxies of all three series in Comparing Galaxies and quoted references to "'Reality...'" in the Time Patrol series and the Psychotechnic History in Reality.

Both Nicholas van Rijn, from the Technic History, and Sherlock Holmes, who exists in the Danellian timeline, visit the Old Phoenix. It is all one multiverse.

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

No need to repeat the doubts I expressed in the combox to your "Reality" blog piece. Just a reminder here.

Except the Sherlock Holmes glimpsed at the Old Phoenix inn might not even have been the Holmes we briefly see in the Danellian timeline in "Time Patrol."

Ad astra! Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,

Probably not. Holmes proliferates through many universes.

Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Exactly, if there are alternate universes, I can imagine A. Conan Doyle writing the Holmes stories in many of them. As we see Stirling doing in the alternate Earth of THE PESHAWAR LANCERS. And Holmes might even be a real person in some alternate universes!

Ad astra! Sean