"He was here. People lived in this, and worked in it, as generation followed generation. He could smell their woodsmoke and their roses."
-To Turn The Tide, CHAPTER FOUR, p. 62.
"This was the first moment when the realty of time travel struck home to Everard."
-For more of this passage, see Reality And Interpretation.
Everard reflects that he is in a hansom cab that is "...not a tourist-trap anachronism..." And it hits him "...with full force that he was here." (ibid.)
This is how we would feel if we could be there.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Living in the past will come with drawbacks. In "Time Patrol" Charles Whitcomb said he would like to live in late Victorian Britain and Everard responded "Yeah? With their medicine and dentistry?" (THE TIME PATROL, TOR Books, 1991, p. 17). Medicine and dentistry very primitive compared to what we have today.
Ad astra! Sean
Yup. For a long time medicine (and dentistry!) were based on theories that had no validity, just plausibility.
Charles gets the best of both worlds -- Time Patrol medicine and dentistry, and living in the Victorian period! Though he knows how the Victorian/Edwardian period ends, with WWI and WW2. Changing that would be very tempting...
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, before middling/late Victorian times things like surgery and dentistry were almost last resorts, to be sought only in desperate/agonizing cases.
Due to needing levothyroxine tablets, I know dang well I would not survive long in the past. I would soon fall into a coma and then croak. Unless, like Charles, I could still make use of advanced medicine.
It must have been very tempting for many would be temporal meddlers in the Time Patrol milieu to try somehow preventing WW I & II. A pity Anderson never examined that idea in one of his Patrol stories--which makes me appreciate even more your TP pastiche, "A Slip in Time." That alternate Austria-Hungary was very intriguing!
Ad astra! Sean
I forgot to mention was made in one of the later Time Patrol stories of Everard sometimes visiting Charles and his wife.
Sean
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