At The Academy

While contemplating temporal paradoxes and historical periods, we must also remember Poul Anderson's descriptions of nature, including pre-human nature:

"Light streamed golden across a prairie reaching beyond sight. Wildflower-starred, grass rippled and, she knew, rustled under the wind. In places, a grove or a thicket interrupted immensity, and in the distance trees lined a great brown river. She knew also how its water and its mud surged with life, larvae, insects, fish, frogs, snakes, waterfowl, herds of rooting merycoidodon like giant hogs or small slender hippopotami. Wings filled heaven." (The Shield Of Time, pp. 129-130)

(I remember "High is heaven and holy" in another Anderson series.)

The following paragraph describes the Time Patrol Academy on an elevation reinforced against floods. Gardens, lawns, bowers and low subtly curved buildings of changing colors have stood for millennia and will be carefully demolished fifty millennia hence. Next, of course, we read that Cadet Wanda Tamberly breathes mild, rich air with odors of growth, soil and herbs - so nothing is missing from an Andersonian appreciation of natural beauty.

We read of the "...great brown river..." and the low, curved buildings of shifting colors when Everard was at the Academy (Time Patrol, p. 6) and Havig's main base in another time travel scenario is similar although in the Pleistocene:

"It stood on a wooded hill, and through the valley below ran a mighty river which...shone in the sunlight like bronze."
-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), p. 157.

The Patrol Academy is in the Oligocene and the Patrol also has a lodge in the Pleistocene.

Britons

In "Time Patrol," Manse Everard and Charlie Whitcomb arrive at Addleton Barrow on a summer midnight in 464 AD.

"'Cultivated fields,' observed Whitcomb. His voice was hushed in the stillness. 'The Jutes and Saxons were mainly yeomen, you know, who came here looking for land. Imagine the Britons were pretty well cleared out of this area some years ago.'" (Time Patrol, p. 30)

Two observations here:

Cultivated fields are a far cry from the first century European wilderness that Everard will experience much later in his career. That wilderness was inhabited by these invaders of Britain.

Angles, Saxons and Jutes displaced the Britons to the South East and North West and bestowed the name "England" so how did the term "British" later come to signify the dominant culture in this island? When James VI of Scotland became James I of England, thus uniting the two kingdoms, he claimed to be restoring a lost Arthurian British unity as described in Geoffrey of Monmouth's work of historical fiction, The History Of The Kings Of Britain, which recounts the Britons' Trojan ancestry and consequent kinship with the Romans and lists not only Arthur but also Lear and Old King Cole as Kings of Britain.

Poul and Karen Anderson tackled a similar legendary history in The King Of Ys.

Flashbacks

The main action of SM Stirling's Conquistador (New York, 2004), Chapters One to Twenty Three and Epilogue, is set in the viewpoint character Tom Christiansen's "present," from June to December, 2009. The Prologue and Interludes are flashbacks to:

April, 1946
May, 1946
1950
1971
1962
1968
2001
1954
1997
1996
2003
2007

The Interlude following Chapter Eleven is the last as I have discovered by flicking ahead. I noticed that the second last Interlude, following Chapter Ten, is set in the author's present, the year of copyright of the novel. Thus, 1946-2003 is past, i.e., events on FirstSide are the same as in our history apart from the existence of the Rolfe family and of other fictitious characters, whereas 2003-2009 is future, i.e., events on Firstside may differ from those in our history although it is possible that Stirling avoids reference to such events in order to preclude any emergent discrepancies. In 2003, the Russians in New Virginia hope to learn how to create their own Gate or Gates, thus ending the Commonwealth monopoly.

Poul Anderson's Manson Everard, recruited by the Time Patrol in 1954, still lives in New York in 1990 and presumably knew of, e.g., Gorbachev as early as '54 although, of course, Anderson does not refer to that Russian Premier until The Shield Of Time, published in 1990.

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?)

"The past is a foreign country..."

Recently, I suggested that, although Poul Anderson's character, Manson Everard, had lived through World War II, when he time traveled back to London 1944, this was to experience that period in a completely different way, no longer as part of it.

Is the past a "foreign country..."?

SM Stirling's character, Roy Tully, says:

"'Put it down to my love of old movies. You soak up enough stuff from the 1930s, 1940s, you realize that that was a different country...look at the people in 'em, and the background stuff nobody thought about because it was like water to fish, ways of doing things and looking at things and such everyone accepted as natural. They thought different, they acted different, hell, they even moved different. You can see it in the way they held a cigarette or got into a car.'"
-SM Stirling, Conquistador (New York, 2004), p. 197.

Is he exaggerating? That was us less than a century ago. But social attitudes to homosexuality and smoking have gone into reverse in my lifetime. And, in Britain, the public response to the Queen's Golden and Diamond Jubilees was not what it had been for her Silver Jubilee.

Tully explains further:

"'...remember all the crap we went through in the war, keeping civilian casualties down? Even when it meant taking losses ourselves?...in the war John Rolfe fought they burned whole enemy cities to cinders and never thought twice about it; carpet-bombed targets in France, too, and if French civilians got caught in the middle - hard cheese, there's a war on. And they stuck the honorable Yasujiru's folks behind wire without a moment's hesitation.'" (pp. 197-198)

I could quote more but there is a limit to how much of a post should be inside quotation marks as against my own reflections on the quoted passages. I urge blog readers to read or reread this passage in Stirling's novel. It is good.

Do the modern military strive to avoid civilian casualties even at the expense of taking losses themselves? Or was it likely in 2003 that they would be doing so before 2009? Stirling is right to project changed attitudes and policies into an imagined future, even a very near future.

Careers In Space And Time

(Including "The Chronic Argonauts" transforms the "conceptual sequence" into two pre-Wells, two Wells, two pre-Anderson and two Anderson items, for what that's worth. See previous post.)

One of my job titles was Careers Adviser. See here.

Readers of Poul Anderson's works view the careers of:

David Falkayn from apprentice to Nick van Rijn's confidante;
Dominic Flandry from Ensign to Fleet Admiral;
Manson Everard from Time Patrol recruit to experienced Unattached agent.

We first see Everard while he is being recruited aged 30 in 1954. His pre-Patrol career was:

lieutenant, US Army Engineers;
design and production work in America, Sweden and Arabia.

In 1952, he had visited Amsterdam and returns there on Patrol business in 1986:

"Thirty four years was a long absence. (Longer than that on his personal world line, of course. He had meanwhile joined the Patrol and become an Unattached agent and snaked around through the ages, across most of the planet. Now the London of Elizabeth the First or the Pasargadae of Cyrus the Great stood him nearer than did the streets he would walk today. Had that summer really been so golden, or had he simply been young, unburdened with too much knowledge?)"
-Poul Anderson, The Time Patrol (New York, 1991), p. 300.

Anderson reminds us of a previous story involving Pasargadae while for the first time informing us that Everard has also visited Elizabethan London. Loss of innocence is the persistent theme of this series. 

 "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.

We last see Everard in 1990 and his career will go on because he has received Patrol anti-age treatment.

Proto-Series

By a "proto-series," I mean a single work that is potentially the opening installment of a series. If Poul Anderson had written nothing further about Nicholas van Rijn, Dominic Flandry or Manson Everard, then the stories that had introduced these characters, "Margin of Profit," "Tiger by the Tail" and "Time Patrol," would have been easily identifiable as three proto-series. (Each of these titles defines the role of its respective central character to a certain extent.)

In fact, each of these narratives was not only extended forwards but also expanded sideways. In other words, we learn more about the Polesotechnic League than just about van Rijn, or even about his protege Falkayn, more about the Terran Empire than just about Flandry, or even about his adversary Aycharaych, and more about the Time Patrol than just about Everard, or even about his protege Tamberly.

Regular readers will know that the League and the Empire were fitted into a single timeline, as the History of Technic Civilization, whereas the Patrol guards an alternative timeline, in the separate Time Patrol series. With the benefit of hindsight, we might have preferred if all three series had been unified. However, Everard operates in historical, not future historical, periods and interacts with the Roman, not the Terran, Empire. Thus, even if the few futuristic references in the Time Patrol series had mentioned the League or the Empire, there would not have been a lot of overlap.

If a proto-series is a single work, then a series is at least two works. In this sense, the Flandry series is followed by, and the Technic History is ended by, one series and three proto-series:

The Game Of Empire is a proto-series about Diana Crowfeather, Flandry's daughter;
"A Tragedy of Errors" is a proto-series about Roan Tom, a star rover during the Long Night;
The Night Face and "The Sharing of Flesh" are a short series about the Allied Planets;
"Star Fog" is a proto-series about Daven Laure, a Ranger of the Commonalty.

Flandry cameos in The Game Of Empire but the last novel about him is the previous volume, A Stone In Heaven, which, I think, deserves further attention for its presentation of the now fully matured Flandry.

Earlier in the Technic History, "Wings of Victory" describes first contact with Ythri during the Grand Survey. Thus, it is both a Grand Survey proto-series and the opening Ythrian story.

Historical Science Fiction

Poul Anderson wrote not only historical fiction and historical fantasy but also historical science fiction (sf). Time travel, immortality and alien contact are sf. Therefore, any of these three subjects in a historical period is historical sf. In fact, Anderson wrote:

one novel about immortals living through various historical periods into the present and on into the future; 
one novel about alien contact in a historical period;
several volumes about time travelers visiting different historical periods as well as various future periods.

Hanno the immortal was born in Tyre when Hiram was its king and Manson Everard of the Time Patrol met Hiram. However, these were in different timelines. The future into which Hanno survives is not the future of the timeline guarded by the Patrol. But other works by Anderson allow for multiple timelines. Thus, Anderson's complete works display both immense imagination and immense historical knowledge.