space travellers discover intelligent life on the Moon or Mars etc;
a time traveller intervenes on a battlefield and changes the course of history - unless another time traveller counter-intervenes and changes history back.
"Delenda Est" by Poul Anderson was not the first story on the second theme but it was a culmination of sorts until Anderson added more instalments to his Time Patrol series.
That second theme really began in pre-ghetto science fiction. One of the Time Traveller's dinner guests suggests that a time traveller might:
"'...verify the accepted account of the Battle of Hastings...'"
-HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1973), p. 11.
But another guest, the Medical Man, comments that a time traveller might attract attention from our ancestors, who were intolerant of anachronisms. Neither suggests intervening in the battle but observation and avoidance of overt anachronism would be two first steps.
(Timelines exist successively along a second temporal dimension just as three-dimensional states of matter exist successively along the first temporal dimension.)
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
It would have been more correct of the Medical Man to say our ancestors would have been suspicious and distrustful of strangers, till bona fides had been established.
Ad astra! Sean
Note that for most of human existence, you -knew- the people around you, and knew them very well.
You'd grown up with them, you knew their personalities and foibles. A stranger moving in would be a stranger for his lifetime, and his descendants would only gradually be accepted.
That didn't mean you necessarily -liked- them, but you -knew- them. You were probably related to a lot of them too. You'd side with them against strangers.
There were exceptions -- big cities, for example, where you could be anonymous, though neighborhoods were tight-knit. Or new settlements.
But cities were a distinct minority; at the height of the Roman Empire, only 12-14% of the population lived in cities... much less if you subtracted the million-strong city of Rome... and even places that were formally cities were often what we'd call large towns.
That was an upper limit imposed by the labor-intensive nature of agriculture.
Modern life, where you don't necessarily know the next-door neighbors, is profoundly unnatural.
Note also that though people moved -- sometimes entire tribes would up-stakes and migrate -- moving was -hard-.
You couldn't make more than about 20 miles a day, unless you were traveling with relays of horses available -- that was about what a Roman legion could do, and that was all fit fairly young men.
If you were taking families, 20 miles would be two or three times what you could do.
Moving long distances was -slow-. And it involved considerable hardship, usually.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Absolutely, what you said on how it was simple prudence for people to be wary of strangers. You clarified and filled out what I had in mind.
The grim struggles of the Ampsivarii, forced out of their lands by hostile tribes in "Star of the Sea," is a good example of how hard and slow it was for a tribe to move en masse.
Ad astra! Sean
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