"'...the information is there. Everything you or I will ever do - everything I'll discover about the life of the past - is known to them uptime.'" (p. 182)
Or: Everything that that she has already discovered will be known uptime.
"'Oh, yes. The work has to be done. Has to have been done, somewhere along the line. No point in my doing it if I already knew; and the danger of setting up a cause-and-effect whirlpool -'" (ibid.)
A cause-and-effect whirlpool is a more picturesque version of a causal or temporal vortex. The Time Patrol series is prose - with some cover illustrations and, as I discovered on the internet, pictures in the original edition of "The Year of the Ransom." There are three story-telling media: narrative, drama and sequential art. The second and third are visual as well as verbal.
Either a screen or a graphic adaptation of the Time Patrol would be able to visualize the characters' reflections on temporal vortices and whirlpools. Indeed, I have just remembered, while writing this post, that, in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman graphic series, a human character, Rose Walker, is a Vortex of Dreams, like a personal causal nexus, and there is a whirlpool effect when Rose breaks down the barriers between everyone else's dreams. That must have been what I was trying to get at.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I think you uploaded here some of those illustrations for the original edition of "The Year of the Ransom." Very striking, and I enjoyed seeing them.
Another striking illustration you tracked down was the one showing us Dominic Flandry and Lady Diana as they arrived at the Crystal Moon for the original magazine version of HUNTERS OF THE SKY CAVE. With Aycharaych ominously lurking in the background!
And the illustrations for the original Ace Books editions of A STONE IN HEAVEN were so profuse they almost turned the story into a manga. Too much so, IMO. Some of them could have been omitted, to make the story feel less cluttered up.
Ad astra! Sean
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