The Nature Of Time

What time travellers do, can do or are able to do depends on the nature of time.

The Time Traveller explores the future of mankind and of life on Earth.

Poul Anderson's Martin Saunders traverses the cosmic temporal cycle.

Anderson's Time Patrol agents must know how events could have occurred differently in order to ensure that they do not occur differently. Thus, Keith Denison traces Aryan migrations, obviously significant to the populations of India, Persia and Europe.

In Anderson's There Will Be Time, Jack Havig's group must know the course of events in order to achieve group aims within the limits laid down by those events. Thus, Caleb Wallis, never assassinated, will remain alive and apparently in control of his time travel group, the Eyrie, which manages future social developments. However, beyond a certain crucial moment, Havig's group will control Wallis.

The Time Patrol series complements abstract discussion of the nature of time with concrete realizations of human life in alternative timelines, e.g., in the Paris of 1980alpha:

narrow street;

high-peaked walls;

women with covered heads, wearing dark ankle-length gowns;

men in long coats and baggy pants;

smoke;

barnyard smells;

a Christian ziggurat instead of Notre Dame.

Real life but not as we know it.