Is The Past A Foreign Country?

Jack Finney was the master of nostalgic time travel fiction. Many of his characters would agree that the past was a foreign country and also would want to emigrate there.

Poul Anderson's character, Manse Everard of the Time Patrol, sees it differently:

"The Midwest of his boyhood, before he went off to war in 1942, was like a dream, a world forever lost, already one with Troy and Carthage and the innocence of the Inuit. He had learned better than to return."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), p. 178.

Innocence lost is the consistent theme of Anderson's Time Patrol series.

In SM Stirling's Conquistador (New York, 2004), the investigators expect to find out of date attitudes preserved and defended on the other side of the Gate:

"'They've got to have kept two-way traffic through the Gate tightly controlled. So things would have changed less on the other side.'
"'Yeah, like my hillbilly ancestors, keepin' the old ways goin' up in the hollers, only more so.'" (p. 197)

Gate Security is what the New Virginians have instead of a Time Patrol. In both cases, the purpose is to maintain the status quo at all costs.

(The investigators coincidentally hit on the same terminology of "the Gate" as the New Virginians?)

Two Problems About Time Travel

Time travel is a subject that it is possible to get horribly wrong. We could compile a long list of time travel errors but I will mention here only that one comic strip time travel story began with a caption saying, "Half an hour ago, at the end of time -" On the other hand, I do not agree with James Blish's opinion that every sf writer who had addressed time travel up until the time of our correspondence had made a mess of it, even Heinlein.

I suggest that there have been three peaks of time travel fiction:

Poul Anderson's two Time Patrol volumes;
Jack Finney's two Time novels;
Audrey Niffeneger's The Time Traveler's Wife.

For a while, there were two peaks, then The Time Traveler's Wife was published.

The following works are close seconds:

"By His Bootstraps" by Robert Heinlein;
The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers;
There Will Be Time by Poul Anderson.

As ever on any such lists, Anderson must appear at least twice. Even on these lists, only those works that confine themselves to the circular causality paradox avoid any logical problems.

I would like to find a fourth peak. Either it has not been published yet or it has been published but I do not know about it yet. I have been given an anthology of twenty five relatively recent time travel stories. However, another factor intervenes. Unless we are professional critics, we need to have some reason to think that a work of fiction might be worth reading before we are motivated to begin reading it. This does not involve prejudging anything. I never set out to read a formulaic Mills and Boon romantic novel although no doubt many of these are good at what they do and it remains possible, however unlikely, that one such will transcend its genre to become a fully rounded novel.

I have read some of the new time travel stories but am having trouble reading them all. In "Palely Loitering," Christopher Priest builds what seems to be an elaborate circular causality structure, then spoils it, in my opinion, with a sudden causality violation. The events described cannot fit into a single timeline but, if our hero has initiated and remained in a divergent timeline, then he cannot return home as he sets out to do at the very end because he is now in a timeline where his younger self's life went differently - although maybe we are supposed to realize this?

I continue to derive more aesthetic and intellectual pleasure from rereading and reassessing the Time Patrol than from reading most other accounts of time travel.

Time Travel Fiction II

The previous post differentiated two kinds of time travel stories. Poul Anderson alone excels at both. I will omit titles on the ground that the page viewer already knows them or can find out or can ask.

Causality Violation
Mark Twain: a classic novel of attempted historical causality violation.
HG Wells: the classic time travel story with only a hint of "...anachronism and utter confusion..."
L Sprague de Camp: a definitive novel of deliberate historical causality violation.
Ward Moore: a definitive novel of accidental historical causality violation.
Jack Finney: nostalgic time travel in several short stories and in two long, illustrated novels presenting an unfortunately confused account of causality violation.

Circular Causality
HG Wells: understated circular causality.
Robert Heinlein: three definitive statements of circular causality in futuristic settings.
Harry Harrison: humorous historical circular causality.
Tim Powers: hard fantasy circular causality.
Richard Matheson: a romantic novel with circular causality.
Audrey Niffeneger: the same sub-genre as Matheson.

Poul Anderson
Three novels of historical circular causality.
A long series about a time travel organization preventing historical causality violations sometimes by closing causal circles.

Three Culminations

I thought that Jack Finney's two Time novels and Poul Anderson's two-volume Time Patrol series were the two culminations of time travel fiction but Audrey Niffeneger's The Time Traveler's Wife (the one of these works that also happens to have been filmed) joined the list as soon as I had read it and I hope that there will be a sequel, The Time Traveler's Daughter.

Finney: nostalgic time travel to earlier decades in the United States;
Niffeneger: a contemporary novel of relationships involving time travel;
Anderson: historical periods and processes and futuristic speculations.

Niffeneger perfects the circular causality paradox. Thus, her novel needs to be compared with Anderson's three non-series time travel novels rather than with his Time Patrol series. Unlike the three by Anderson, Niffeneger's novel is a longer work, is neither historical nor futuristic but entirely contemporary and deals with personal relationships, not with any wider issues.

Henry tells Claire not to sign a drawing because he has seen it unsigned in the future but she signs it... But events remain consistent despite this. (She was right to trim off the signature because they want their known future to be their experienced future. A time traveler who sets out to change events might succeed in which case they will be in a different timeline, which is not what they want.) See here.

What I am saying here is that I recommend not only Poul Anderson's time travel works but also certain others for comparison and that these others definitely include The Time Traveler's Wife.

Senlac II

By page 10 of Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), the text has not yet informed the reader that this will be a time travel novel. We have probably read the blurb but, apart from this, we have not yet been told that in this narrative historical events will have a double significance. Not only do they affect human lives both immediately and later but also a time traveller can decide whether to revisit or shun them.

However, Anderson which here can mean either the author Poul or the narrator Robert, prepares us for what is to come by carefully delineating the historical period of the early 1930's when the time traveller Jack Havig is born:

a worldwide depression;
the Japanese conquest of Manchuria;
a bonus march on Washington;
the Lindbergh kidnapping;
Hitler Chancellor of Germany;
a new US President due to take office;
Prohibition about to be ended;
for local colour, "...springtime in these parts is as lovely as our autumn." (p. 10)

A different era, although Havig can revisit it - but will he want to? If this novel were written by Jack Finney, then there would be no doubt. The protagonist would be strongly motivated by nostalgia for this or an earlier period. Anderson's characters differ from Finney's and from each other. In a very different time travel scenario, one Time Patrolman says, of Victorian London:

"I'd like to have lived here..." (1)

- and, when his colleague asks:

"Yeah? With their medicine and dentistry?" (1)

defiantly replies:

"And no bombs falling." (1)

(This character's fiancee had died in an air raid in 1944.)

Much later, both in history and in the characters' lives, the colleague thinks, of his own birth period:

 "The Midwest of his boyhood, before he went off to war in 1942, was like a dream, a world forever lost, already one with Troy and the innocence of the Inuit. He had learned better than to return." (2)

But why not return sometimes? I would.

Back to Havig's birthplace:

"Senlac is a commercial center for an agricultural area..." (p. 10)

with "...some light industry..." and a big Rotary Club. Robert and Kate Anderson's friends are her father (a local banker), the public librarian, professors and their wives from Holberg College forty miles away and New Englanders Tom and Eleanor Havig who attend the local church as the only way to keep Tom's high school science teaching job which pays so little that he must supplement his income with a summer job in creamery quality control. A teacher needing a summer job? Again, a different era (I hope).

Robert drives his Marmon down Union St to Elm to visit Eleanor who has panicked because Jack disappeared when she dropped him in surprise at hearing, then seeing, another baby crying in his crib. The baby in the crib is indeed Jack so she must have hallucinated...

The reader who has skipped the blurb might begin to suspect time travel and circular causality. When dropped into the crib, the baby time travelled a few minutes into the past and screamed, thus causing his mother to carry him into the bedroom and drop him in surprise. The novel will present several intricate elaborations of this paradox.

(1) Anderson, Poul, Time Patrol, New York, 2006, p. 28.
(2) Anderson, Poul, The Shield Of Time, New York, 1990, p. 178.