Experience Before Understanding

Before he is shuttled to the Oligocene, Manse Everard has been carefully warned that the organization that is recruiting him patrols time. Some other characters experience a disorienting dislocation and must then come to an understanding of what has happened to them. In Poul Anderson's The Dancer From Atlantis, Duncan Reid is snatched by the vortex and black thunders and deposited in a desolation where, he thinks, he must be dreaming, delirious or dead. Needless to say:

"A wind boomed..."

-Poul Anderson, The Dancer From Atlantis (New York, 1972), III, p. 25.

Reid must learn that he is in the time of Atlantis.

("...vortex..." is a terminological parallel with Doctor Who.)

In James Blish's A Midsummer Century, John Martels finds himself not only in a strange environment but also in the wrong body and is stunned to be told that, by his reckoning, he is now in about 25,000 A.D. In this respect at least, his experience is closer to that of Wells' Time Traveller than of Anderson's visitors to historical periods.

In Anderson's The Corridors Of Time, Malcolm Lockridge travels along what looks like a long underground tunnel before being told that the tunnel has taken him and his companion to a historical period.

We encourage blog readers to remember other examples. 

We are puzzled by this long detour into time travel and might return to Starfarers tomorrow.

(Timefarers would make a good title.)