Having read Twain, de Camp, Anderson and Turtledove, Stirling chooses his premises with extreme care:
not just a single time traveller but a team;
they have not arrived in 165 CE by accident but have been sent to that particular year;
their leader has military training and all have knowledge of the period, crucially including linguistic knowledge (there is an infinite distance between not knowing a word of Greek and being able to speak it badly and incompletely);
they have bags of Roman coins, books and equipment;
the Jewish merchant who finds them newly arrived and unconscious beside their luggage reflects that he is not a bandit and does not cut their throats for their goods but realizes that these strangers are people with whom he can do business to their mutual advantage: a very wise man representing the best that humanity is capable of, certainly in that period.
With all these favourable premises, what is going to happen next? Stirling can write a utopia, a dystopia, something between, something completely unexpected.
Will something like Poul Anderson's Time Patrol intervene? Unlikely. And that would be an additional premise. Sf writers explore different options.
3 comments:
Tho' a number of those are coincidences. For example, the Austrian physicist gets -American- experts in Roman history because he doesn't dare get them closer to home.
Yes indeed although, once the coincidences have finished operating, it is down to the time travellers to make the best of their situation.
Kaor, to Both!
It was also a coincidence that Herr Doktor Fuchs failed to completely and safely make that transition to AD 165.
Ad astra! Sean
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