This is the first of five chapters headed 209 B. C. in PART TWO of Volume II of the complete Time Patrol collection.
Physically, all that happens in this chapter is that Hipponicus' caravan, including the guard Meander (Manse Everard), approaches and enters Bactra. But high technology is at work. An unmanned spacecraft had tracked the caravan, revealing that it would suit Everard's purposes to join it. So Meander was with the caravan when it was tracked.
We read the usual Andersonian details about the countryside, then the city. Everard recalls Afghanistan, 1970, and reflects:
"A lot of change and chance would blow from the steppes in the millennia to come. Too damn much." (p. 22)
Too much? But we would not want the region or the world to remain as it was in 209 BC? "Change and chance" is an evocative phrase encapsulating much that is to be found in Poul Anderson's historical fiction, historical science fiction, time travel fiction and future histories. That phrase says it all. The particular works fill in the details.
Change and chance...
8 comments:
Those changes mostly involved war and slaughter.
So Everard's "Too damn much" refers principally to war and slaughter? OK.
Kaor, Paul!
To me that was exactly what Everard (and Anderson) meant.
Ad astra! Sean
Pretty much ever inhabited place on earth is an endless palimpsest of conquesrt and migration(*). All title-deeds are written in human blood; the only difference between one place and another is how long the blood has had to dry.
(*) with the minor and unimportant exception of some recently settled islands.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And the atrocities of 10/7 was a brutally clear example of fanatical jihadists and antisemites trying to repeat that pattern of extermination/conquest, with the goal of destroying Israel/exterminating the Jews. A pattern I see no reason to ever be permanently stopped except by the Second Coming of Christ.
Ad astra! Sean
Disagree.
Kaor, Paul!
And I believe in having no illusions about human beings. And I distrust myself as well.
Ad astra! Sean
I believe in having no illusions about human beings.
The 10/7 atrocities were: (i) mass murder (they killed two babies which was two too many but they did not burn any - that was a lie): people breaking out of their confinement in what has been described several times as a "concentration camp." The conflict did not start on 10/7.
It is the Israelis who are conquering territory. Everyone who opposes them is not a fanatical jihadist or antisemite. I have met many Jews who oppose them. Israel is a racist and now genocidal state which has no right to exist. To oppose the existence of a state is not to call for the extermination of Jews. (I should not have to say that.)
We have the capacity to solve these problems without divine intervention which is a very long time in coming.
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