Narrative Developments

Each of the four stories collected in Poul Anderson's Guardians Of Time is narrated from Manse Everard's point of view and in the third person. The uniform format is that each story features Everard working with one other Time Patrol agent just as the uniform format of one subseries of Isaac Asimov's Robot stories is that each story features the same pair of US Robots troubleshooters, Powell and Donovan, but each time working with a different problematic experimental robot. (Indeed, Anderson later contributed one such Powell and Donovan story.)

In a later edition of Guardians Of Time, re-entitled The Guardians Of Time, the one extra story is again a third person narrative but differs in two other respects. First, it is shorter and, secondly, its viewpoint character is Patrol agent Tom Nomura with Everard still present but now as a background supporting character. Everard has achieved an elder statesman status.

These five stories have in common that they had been published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction before they were collected.

The second collection, Time Patrolman, presented several innovations. First, its two, longer, stories had not previously been published anywhere else but were original to this collection. Secondly, although the first instalment, "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks," reverts to Everard as viewpoint character, the second, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth," introduces Patrol agent Carl Farness who is not only a new one-off viewpoint character, with Everard again relegated to a supporting role, but also, for the first time in this series, a first person narrator. Thirdly, several chapters present the points of view neither of Farness nor of any other time traveller but of people living in the past. These chapters show us "Carl" as he appears to others who do not know that he is a time traveller - or indeed that there is any such thing as time travel - but who do come to think that Carl is Odin. These chapters are third person narratives.

The complicated narrative structure of the third volume, The Year Of The Ransom, is summarized here where I should also have mentioned that Wanda Tamberly's viewpoint passages are first person narrations although Wanda becomes instead a third person character in The Shield Of Time. When that novel, the fourth volume in the series, informs us that:

"Red Fox and his men could not harry the mammoths much farther..." (II, p. 149)

- we are again in the point of view of a character in the past who meets time travellers without understanding what they are. There will be more of that in this novel.

"Star of the Sea" presents not only past but also mythological points of view. 

"Death and the Knight" opens with the viewpoint of Hugues Marot in 1307 but then reverts to Everard with whom the series concludes.

Quite a ride through time.