Geological Epochs In Other Poul Anderson Time Travel Fiction II

The Jurassic, named after the Jura Mountains in the European Alps, is not an epoch but a period extending from over 200 million years ago to about 145 million years ago. The supercontinent Pangaea split into northern Laurasia and southern Gondwana. (I first read of Pangaea in another work of fiction when Alan Moore's character Tom Strong, time traveling, fought a protean continent-spanning organism called "the Pangaean.") Dinosaurs dominated the land and birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs.

In Poul Anderson's "Wildcat," time travelers drilling for oil in the Jurassic must contend with plesiosaurs, brontosaurs and tyrannosaurs and must then colonize Jurassic Earth because time travelers to the future have discovered that there will be a nuclear war in the twentieth century.

In "The Nest," a settlement of time traveling brigands lasts for mere decades during the ten million plus year Oligocene epoch whereas, in the Time Patrol series, the Patrol maintains its Academy for half a million years in that epoch. The twelve year old protagonist of "The Little Monster" is accidentally projected into the Pliocene whereas the Time Patrol presents only a brief incident during the transition from the Miocene to the Pliocene. Both the Little Monster's adventures and the Patrol's Miocene-Pliocene base are located in Spain.

And I think that that exhausts geological epochs in Poul Anderson's fiction?

Answers

As Poul Anderson's "Wildcat" proceeds, conversations between the characters disclose quite a complicated time travel scenario:

they are drilling for oil in the Jurassic;

their employer is the Trans-temporal Oil Company, Transoco, although the US government has a strong say in proceedings;

there is a shortage of oil in the twentieth century because Transoco has taken so much of it from the past;

 

the existence of time travel is a state secret except to those who are involved in it;

 

men and equipment are transmitted through time by a projector that remains in the present;

 

an inertial effect decrees that time travelers spending a year in the past necessarily return to their period a year after their departure;

 

thus, the concept of simultaneity between past and present is applicable;

 

the minimum period of pastward transmission is a hundred million years whereas the future can be reached in hundred year hops;

Herries wants heavy weapons to use against dinosaurs but such weapons are needed back home where the international situation is critical.

What can this be leading to? Can time travel somehow be used to affect that international situation?

HG Wells' The Time Machine, written in the late nineteenth century before heavier than air flight, is dated by incomprehensible phrases like "'...plough you for the Little-go...'" "Wildcat" is dated by its Cold War scenario and by its use of the term "Negroes."

When, Where And Why?

In Poul Anderson's "Wildcat," the opening paragraph has three sentences:

in the first, it rains in a swamp;
in the second, the viewpoint character sees a derrick and a floodlight;
in the third, he hears a brontosaur.

So where is he? In the past, in the Lost World or on another planet?

The second paragraph establishes only that he is on a dock and that it is still raining. In the third and fourth paragraphs, he evades, and shoots at, an attacking plesiosaur. Half way down the second page, Herries' altercation with the guards, who should have been more vigilant, establishes that he and they are a hundred million years in the past.

So why is this story in Conquests, a collection on the theme of human warfare? All will be revealed but that may be the limit of my blogging for today!

(Meanwhile, still among Wellsian themes, we have moved from space travel to time travel.)