From The Time Traveller To Manson Everard

Poul Anderson, 1146 A. D. IN Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), pp. 414-429.

Actions converge. Wanda is already in place as a guest in the Conti household in 1146. Now, Everard has learned that Lorenzo de Conti has to be prevented from marrying his fiancee. That should be easy to arrange... Wanda has a role to play - also Everard as the angel who tells Lorenzo that, because of his transgression, he must go immediately on crusade without marrying first. But the beta timeline has one last line of defence. Lorenzo, suspicious, grapples the "angel" and feels that he is a man. At last, an Andersonian physical fight settles the issue. Mission accomplished.

At one stage, the angelic Everard says:

"'Go and sin no more.'" (p. 426)

Yet another Biblical quotation.

See also:

Lorenzo And Religion

Everard As Angel

What a long way we have come from Poul Anderson's first Time Patrol story, "Time Patrol," and, before that, The Time Machine. There are conceptual continuities between Wells' work and Anderson's. (In fact, a young English writer got the idea of time travel from a mutant time traveller in Anderson's There Will Be Time if we can willingly suspend disbelief enough for that!) The reality of time travel first strikes home to Manse Everard in London in 1894, the year before The Time Machine was published. Time Patrollers sit on their mass-produced timecycles like the Time Traveller on his single Time Machine whereas mutant time travellers see events flashing past as does the Time Traveller.

A lone inventor constructed the Time Machine in the late nineteenth century or the time effect is a by-product of the search for a means of instantaneous transportation in 19352 AD. Humanity will devolve into Morlocks and Eloi or will evolve into Danellians. Between them, two authors cover multiple options.

If anyone who has never read any sf asks where to start, I would suggest The Time Machine to be followed immediately by Time Patrol. Of course there is more to sf than time travel and more to time travel than Wells or Anderson but there two works survey the past and future of mankind and that concerns everyone, not just sf readers.