The Time Patrol prevents time criminals:
"...from destroying that history which leads through the ages to the Danellians. For them this may be a matter of simple survival. They have never told us, we hardly ever see them, we do not know."
- 1965 A. D., pp. 159-171 AT pp. 163-164.
It seems that there is a very great deal that we, the readers, do not know but that we might have learned some of if the series had continued. As it happens, we do learn more than we would have done if the series had remained just its original four instalments.
Imagine if someone showed up now who not only claimed to remember a different history of the twentieth century but who also displayed documentation and other physical evidence to back up his account? Like coinage that would have been minted if the British Royal Abdication had not happened? Documents signed and sealed by an alternative President of the United States? And so on. What would be the simplest explanation of such phenomena? Entire other universes or just some quantum fluctuations?
I only work here.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Iow, Anderson kept his options open about the Danellians.
Many scoffers would insist those documents and coins had to be forgeries and counterfeits. To be fair there are real world examples of extremely dubious documents. One example I've read being CHINA UNDER THE EMPRESS DOWAGER, by J.O.P. Bland and Edmund Backhouse (first pub. in 1910). Bland himself was an honest man deceived by Backhouse who, along with much genuine material, supplied his colleague with forged documents, such as the "diary" of Ching Shan in Chapter XVII. Historians are generally agreed that this diary is a fraud. The cleverest frauds mixes truth with the lies.
All that said, CHINA UNDER THE EMPRESS DOWAGER is worth reading, with due caution, as a very interesting biography of Empress Dowager Tzu-hsi.
Ad astra! Sean
Forgeries: by far the simplest explanation. We would need a lot of evidence before we accepted not only alternative timelines but also interaction between them.
Paul: yup. It would be dismissed as fakes -- and as you say, that fits Occam's Razor.
Kaor, to Both!
Exactly, the simplest explanation for cases like this is that those documents/coins were forgeries. And, considering how widely Stirling reads, I would not be surprised to find out he too read the Bland/Backhouse book.
I also recalled how Herr Doktor Fuchs used real gold to counterfeit aurei of Antoninus Pius in TO TURN THE TIDE.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment