Through Time And Into The Future With Wells And Anderson

HG Wells' solitary Time Traveller seated on his single Time Machine, hurtling through tomorrow into futurity, then returning to the same day but to the opposite corner of his laboratory because the Morlocks will move the Machine from a lawn to inside the White Sphinx in 802,701 A.D., suggests:

"...curious possibilities of anachronism and of utter confusion..."

-HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1973), 3, p. 17 -

- whereas Poul Anderson's thousands of Time Patrol agents seated on their mass-produced timecycles, appearing and disappearing throughout history and prehistory, guard time against anachronism and confusion. The Time Traveller suggested a problem that the Time Patrol addresses. Before the Nine, the Neldorians, the Exaltationists, individual time criminals or personal causal nexuses was the original Time Traveller - albeit in an alternative timeline but the Patrol addresses divergent timelines. Its agents preserve the evolution of human beings into Danellians and prevent aberrations like devolution into Morlocks and Eloi.

Wells' single volume of future history contrasts sharply with Anderson's many volumes recounting eight or nine future histories. Read Wells, then Anderson.