Subordination

We see human beings subordinated to:

Martians in The War Of The Worlds;

extrasolar aliens in Martian-like machines in John Christopher's Tripods Trilogy;

Borthudians in the van Rijn period of Poul Anderson's Technic History;

green Merseians in the Flandry period of the Technic History;

feline kzinti in Larry Niven's Know Space History;

green Treens in Dan Dare;

Daleks in Doctor Who;

fellow human beings who make themselves biologically superior in SM Stirling's Draka History.

(That is another of those lists that grew in the writing.)

I was reminded of Draka and serfs when reading about a kzin and his human secretary. Like a Draka, the kzin promises to attend the secretary's offspring's naming-day celebration.

Subordination can be one way to survival. In a novel by Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle, workers asked what they thought about the prospect of an alien invasion, said that, under the aliens, they would still have to work. In one of Aesop's fable, a donkey carrying a heavy burden is advised to run away from an invading army but, when told that they are unlikely to make him carry anything heavier because he is already at his limit, says that he will stay where he is.

Having said all that, slavery is definitely worse than paid work and should be resisted at all costs!

Chronology Of The Future

The contents page of Poul Anderson's Starship (New York, 1982) tells us that a "Chronology of the Future" begins on page 283 but, when we turn to that page, we find instead "A CHRONOLOGY OF THE PSYCHOTECHNIC SERIES."

There are two ways to construct such a fictitious chronology. In his Author's Note at the end of The Psychotechnic League, Anderson wrote:

"...I drew up a chart in the manner of Heinlein and, from time to time, completed a piece whose title was on it." (p. 284)

On this model, the chart listing fictional dates and titles preexisted the pieces corresponding to the titles. The opposite approach is to compile the chronological chart while writing a series. Thus, the chart hopefully prevents inconsistencies without prescribing what is to be written. It cannot become a straightjacket.

Doctor Who visited many historical and future periods. Script editors should have compiled a chart to keep the series consistent. However, Terrance Dicks, meeting fans at Lancaster Literature Festival, said that they did not keep it consistent. Fans were supposed either not to notice or not to care. But there are two kinds of fans. We value Heinlein's Future History and Anderson's future histories for several reasons, not least because of their detailed and careful consistency.

Time Traveling Companions

Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 207-288.

HG Wells' Time Traveler travels alone on a one-man vehicle, almost like a bicycle.

The Time Patrol has timecycles for one or more than one and also larger time shuttles.

The Doctor, with his TARDIS larger inside than out, has had innumerable implausible "companions." (At last one has died. That is going to happen if untrained and unprepared personnel are continually taken into danger.)

In Poul Anderson's The Dancer From Atlantis, a malfunctioning temporal vehicle collects unwilling passengers en route.

In "Flight to Forever," Martin Saunders' time projector is almost the opposite of the TARDIS. Most of its thirty feet of length house the dimensional projector and battery banks. Two men squeeze into the small forward cabin. Saunders embarks with Sam Hull, later travels with Belgotai of Syrtis and ends his journey alone. Like the Doctor, he changes his companion, although not as often. So what becomes of Hull and Belgotai? Time will tell but probably not tonight.

TV Series

Having mentioned Doctor Who, let us imagine Poul Anderson's Time Patrol as a TV series. Most installments, starting with "Time Patrol," would have to be serialized to do them justice. But this in turn would make for a very long on-going TV series:

"Time Patrol"
"Brave To Be A King"
"The Only Game In Town"
"Delenda Est"
"Gibraltar Falls"
"The Sorrow Of Odin The Goth"
"Star Of The Sea"
"The Year Of The Ransom"
"Ivory, And Apes, And Peacocks"
"The Stranger That Is Within Thy Gates"
"Women And Horses And Power And War"
"Before The Gods That Made The Gods"
"Beringia"
"Riddle Me This"
"Amazement Of The World"
"Death And The Knight"

Although five of these sixteen items are short enough to become just a single episode each, some of the others could become lengthy serials in their own right - and Merau Varagan is a perfect continuing villain, comparable to Doctor Who's The Master. Most Doctor Who fans do not know where the good time travel fiction is to be found. The three short chapters that are conversations with Guion could be lengthened by dramatizing what the characters are talking about, e.g., in one case, Altamont/Holmes outwitting German spies, then being misled by the Patrol.

Big Questions For Time Travelers

I gave up on Doctor Who a while ago but I have just been told that the current Doctor recently met Davros, Creator of the Daleks, as a child and decided against killing him not because he:

did not yet know what that child would become;

thought that it was impossible to change the past;

believed that it would be wrong to try to change the past;

- but only because he did not want to kill a child. So why not prevent Davros' parents from meeting, instead? Exactly this question is asked of Hitler in Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series. It is good to see that popular sf addresses the big questions although it usually makes a mess of the paradoxes, as Doctor Who did when an earlier companion tried to prevent her father's death.

The blog moves in two directions. We can either find an endless wealth of details within a single text or connect that text to many others. The Time Patrol connects with Anderson's other time travel works and also with The Time Machine, Doctor Who etc. Speaking of sf villains, I expect to read more about SM Stirling's Draka shortly and, if anyone qualifies for the description "human Daleks," it is the Draka Security Directorate.

Just Beginning

One way to end a story is to show that another story is just beginning. At the end of Satan's World by Poul Anderson, the trader team sets off on a new mission. Their lives have significantly changed in that they are now rich enough not to need the work but they do it because they want to. And, while they are outward bound, they play poker. They remain in character and their lives continue.

A later Star Trek film ends with Kirk and his crew taking a new Enterprise out of the Solar System, "thataway." The second and last Doctor Who cinema feature film ends with the TARDIS crew not back home but attacked by Roman soldiers...

SM Stirling found an appropriate ending for his alternative history novel, Conquistador. A sabre-tooth is routinely going about its business eating a giant sloth when a new Gate between worlds opens before it... This scene could lead to a sequel but does not need to. We can turn to other novels by Stirling - and also by Anderson or Turtledove - in order to read more about alternative histories.

Today So Far

Thank you, whoever you are, for so far 106 pageviews today despite no new posts on this blog today until this one. Laid up with a toothache, I have:

continued with other reading;
reread earlier posts;
copied three of them onto the Poul Anderson's Cosmic Environments blog.

I will shortly watch Doctor Who because I so rarely do. The new series is disappointing regular fans so might possibly contain something of interest and might lead to yet more, unfavorable, comparisons with Poul Anderson's time travel canon.

I will check back here in due course.

Later: Doctor Who - forget it.

Time Travelers II

Being laid up with a cold, I watched another episode of Doctor Who, which I would not normally do. This series unites Britain. My wife called, "Doctor Who is starting." I remember this being said among a gang of Hell's Angels in a BBC documentary about that group of social misfits. When the Brigadier said, "Of course, Great Britain is the only country trusted by all others," University students laughed as if this was a satire whereas primary school pupils would have accepted it as nationalistic propaganda. The Brigadier, taking a phone call from the Prime Minister, said, "Immediate and decisive action! Yes, Madam," some considerable time before Margaret Thatcher had become PM.

Are there any comparisons to be made with the Time Patrol? Maybe a few. They are different kinds of series. Doctor Who is action-adventure - they fight clockwork men and Daleks - whereas the Time Patrol is historical fiction combined with science fiction. But Doctor Who script writers have learned to utilize the subtleties of their time travel premise a bit more. Usually, the Doctor's current young attractive female human companion (don't say "girl friend") resides with him in the Tardis. Instead, Clara teaches in a contemporary British school. The Doctor collects her for companionship now and again and, of course, after each adventure, returns her to a moment after her departure, although, on this occasion, a colleague notices that she has changed her clothes. When the Doctor arrives, he is two weeks late with promised coffee.

I have already remarked on differences between the means of time travel. Time Patrol members, seated on timecycles, travel instantaneously whereas the Time Lord, enclosed in his multidimensional vehicle, experiences transit time between departure and arrival. The entire Time Patrol series is an extremely sophisticated statement of the causality violation paradox whereas one Doctor Who episode made a total hash of this concept. Earlier versions of the time travelers were seen to disappear. Because a death was prevented, the universe stopped and some sort of temporal anti-bodies arrived to destroy everything. Just pretend that none of this happened.

Another Parallel Between Poul Anderson And Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman has also written time travel:

two Doctor Who scripts;
The Books Of Magic, Book 4;
one scene in Neverwhere (TV series and novel by Gaiman, graphically adapted by Carey) (two villains in the historical past accept a job in the present).

Apart from that brief scene in Neverwhere, all this time travel occurs in other writers' and editors' fictional universes, the BBC Whoverse and the DC Universe. Although The Books Of Magic is fantasy, not hard sf, I found enough time travel logic in it to post about (see here).

Both Anderson and Gaiman have written powerful fantasies informed by, and infused with, mythology and literature. (I prefer Gaiman's graphic fiction to his prose fiction whereas Anderson's, of course, is entirely prose - although not prosaic.) The main difference between them is that Anderson was also a master of other genres, historical fiction, detective fiction and hard sf.

Time Travelers

I have just watched parts of Peter Capaldi's first performance as the Doctor: not as bad as I feared from the Radio Times plot summary and earlier series. To everyone who watches Doctor Who, I say, "Read The Time Machine and The Time Patrol. The Time Traveler is the original and Manson Everard is a better series character."

The Doctor, his assistant, Clara, and a dinosaur are in Victorian England so we recognize several time travel themes and periods coming together. Nowadays, the script writers occasionally exploit the subtleties of time travel. In this case, the Doctor has regenerated so Clara is not sure whether he is the same person but they travel to a time before this latest regeneration and the earlier Doctor, knowing that they are there, phones Clara and reassures her. (Guest appearance by the previous actor.) The regenerated Doctor sees Clara on the phone and knows who is speaking to her.

Everard does not regenerate but does potentially live for centuries or millennia so that, like "immortals" in other works by Anderson, he must have some way of coping with the problem of accumulating memory.

A New Eon IV

Greg Bear, Eon (London, 2002).

The Stone is, possibly, a time machine larger inside than out. That sounds familiar from a BBC science fiction perspective. As Huckleberry Finn might say, I don't take no stock in Doctor Who. However, like Star Trek and Superman, it could be reconceptualized as worthwhile science fiction:

the Time Lords should be our descendants;
Vulcan should be a separated human colony;
for two possible explanations of the Kryptonians, see here.

Greg Bear does some of this kind of work in Eon:

explorers of the Stone find that, whatever the explanation, this mysterious object is a human artifact;
to understand its apparently infinite seventh chamber, they engage a mathematician whose works include Non-gravity Bent Geodesics of n-Spatial Reference Frames: An Approach to Superspace Visualization and Probability Clustering (p. 24).

That sounds as if it just might have something to do with extending a chamber to infinity. Non-gravity bent geodesics and superspace might even explain Superman's flight and other powers. I honestly believe that a reconceptualized Doctor Who would benefit from this kind of treatment but, be that as it may, we can in any case appreciate serious science fiction like this novel by Greg Bear.

Not Tardis But Diaglossa

Doctor Who's Tardis not only transports its passengers to other times, places and planets but also enables them to understand and speak whatever language is currently in use at their arrival point. Impossible. At least two fundamental changes need to be made in any revamp of Doctor Who: first, the Time Lords should be not an extraterrestrial species but descendants of humanity, maybe colonists of Gallifrey, and, secondly, they should encounter linguistic problems when they time travel although, by the time we meet them, they might conceivably have learned many languages and programmed them into something like the "diaglossas" in Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time (London, 1968).

A diaglossa, a small artifact inserted into an ear, is a molecular encoder storing important languages and basic customs of an area and era, drawing energy from body heat and meshing its output with the user's brain, thus adding an artificial memory center. Thus, different diaglossas are necessary for different periods and the diaglossas' programmers have had to learn the languages and customs in the first place. Similar effect to the Tardis but a lot more plausible. Diaglossas are silent about historical events so that native auxiliaries will not learn their futures.

In northern Europe in 1827 BC, Lockridge's diaglossa gives him an agglutinative language with a complex grammar and many fine distinctions unknown to civilized men, like twenty words for water, but no single word for "mass," "government" or "monotheism," and very different concepts of cause, time, self and death.

At the gate of Viborg in 1535 AD, Lockridge is suspected of spying because, although he claims to be English, his diaglossa makes him fluent in both German and Danish. In the late fortieth century, he has learned how to draw information from his diaglossa: two languages, Western and Eastern; two ideologies, materialism and pantheism; much information on Ranger subordination of underlings but far less on the Wardens, whose diaglossa he uses, although he does get an impression of benevolent hierarchy (!).

Space Time Wars

Although a war fought throughout space and time sounds like a straightforward idea, it is anything but. Doctor Who would have us believe that the Doctor is the last surviving Time Lord with no access to fellow Time Lords since they all died in a Time War. However, if they all died at a particular time, then surely he is able to travel to before they died? And, before dying, some of them would surely have traveled into their future? Therefore, some may exist now or, failing that, will in a while? And, if, as its name suggests, the Time War is fought at various times, then some of it is happening now or will in the future? Thus, even if all the Time Lords are to die in that war, they need not be all dead yet and, even if they were, a time traveler could still have access to them?

I am reading John Brunner's Threshold Of Eternity and expect some surprises before the end. The blurb informs us that:

"...there was a war going on throughout space and time. A war fought by men of different epochs, on planets of different cultures..." (Threshold Of Eternity, New York, 1959, p. 1)

So far in the text, however, the war, in our future, is only against an alien enemy in space. The time element consists of the fact that a battling spaceship can suffer a "...temporal surge..." that scatters its crew throughout history although they have a mechanism by which they can instantly return to their present (pp. 10-11). I expect that there is going to be more to it than that but I wonder if the "...men of different epochs, on planets of different cultures..." exist only in the blurb? (I will soon find out.)

As always, Poul Anderson comes to the rescue. His time travelers move through real history, not through abstract "space and time." In his The Corridors Of Time, rival human powers on a future Earth dispatch agents throughout history and prehistory. Unable to change events, they nevertheless recruit supporters and try to influence long term historical tendencies in order to determine an outcome in their future from which both sides are barred by their successors who, we learn, have transcended the conflict.

That really is a war fought throughout space and time.

Dancer And Who

I have suggested some parallels between Poul Anderson's The Dancer From Atlantis (London, 1977) and Doctor Who but, of course, the differences are greater.

(i) Sahir, the dark skinned man in the malfunctioning space-time vehicle, is not from another planet but, more logically, from the future of Earth.

(ii) Sahir does carry a language teaching device, the mentator, but, of course, mere travel to another time in his vehicle, the anakro, does not bestow the ability to speak with the locals in whatever language they use.

(iii) The three people from different periods who are accidentally pulled through time by the anakro do not then accompany Sahir through space and time. On the contrary, he dies so that they are stranded and must devise a way to attract other time travelers for transport home. Thus, they do become traveling companions but not through time.

(iv) In Dancer, " 'There aren't...won't be...many time expeditions. Ever. Energy cost too great...and...environment couldn't stand much of that...' " (p. 33) This differentiates Dancer not only from the Doctor Who scenario of many Time Lords but also from Anderson's other scenarios of a Time Patrol, time corridors and mutant time travelers.

(v) The Tardis disappears, spends some of its time in "the Time Vortex" and emerges elsewhere in the continuum whereas the anakro travels along a great circle on the Earth's surface. The early model sets off on a pre-set course from Hawaii towards an ancient energy-releasing catastrophe which should boost it towards its eventual destination in prehistoric Africa.

(vi) The defect in the Tardis meant that the Doctor could not control where or when it emerged. The defect in the anakro is faulty insulation against the effects of the "...immense energy concentration to warp the continuum." (p. 33) This has two consequences. First, warp fields that should not have interacted with matter en route do in fact draw along a human body, Duncan Reid, and the halt ordered by Sahir cannot be immediate because of inertia so that a few more bodies are drawn along before the anakro can stop. Secondly, just before stopping, they pass the catastrophe. Its interaction with the warp fields causes a radiation blast killing Sahir's partner and causing Sahir also to die soon after leaving the anakro and establishing communication with Reid via the mentator (p. 33).