Turning Point

"The Sorrow of Odin the Goth."

In 347, when Tharasmund is about to name his and Ulrica's first son, the Wanderer arrives. Tharasmund asks the Wanderer to bestow the name which is to be Hathawulf. This obviously means something to the Wanderer who:

"...stood altogether still for a while that went on and on. At last he lifted his head. The hat brim shadowed his face. 'Hathawulf,' he said low, as if to himself. 'Oh, yes. I understand now.' A little louder: 'Weard will have it so. Well, then, so be it, I will give him his name.'" (p. 406)

In the myths, Odin will be one-eyed. Here, his face is shadowed... The story grows.

The concept of "Weard" fits with a time traveller's knowledge of what is to be. But what exactly is it in this case? Let us review what we already know.

In 372, the brothers, Hathawulf and Solbern, will set out to attack King Ermanaric who has had their sister, Swanhild, trampled to death by horses. The Wanderer will arrive to prevent their half-brother, Alawin, from accompanying them but will also refuse to foretell the outcome of the attack. 

In 1980, Carl Farness tells Manse Everard that, according to saga and Eddas, the brothers, Hamther and Sorli, set out to attack King Jormunrek who had had their sister, Svanhild, trampled to death by horses. On their way, they killed their half-brother, Erp, who offered to accompany them. Invulnerable to steel, they killed many of the king's men and severely wounded him but either Hamther let slip their invulnerability to stone or one-eyed Odin appeared and divulged this crucial military intelligence. Either way, Jormunrek ordered his surviving men to stone the brothers to death. The End.

Carl, who is the Wanderer, already knows that Jormunrek is Ermanaric. He now realizes that "Hathawulf" will be elided to "Hamther" and also knows that Tharasmund and Ulrica intend to call their second son "Solbern." While investigating a story about Hamther and Sorli, he has suddenly realized that the historical originals of these two literary characters are his own great-grandsons. If he had not time travelled to 300 to begin investigating their story, then they would not have existed. He has unintentionally meddled in the time stream. Surely he should now consult an Unattached agent before proceeding any further?

Instead, he considers only two possibilities. First, since his job is only to record whatever songs and stories emerge from the fight with Ermanaric, he could return from 1934 to the fourth century only after the death of Hathawulf, thus ending any further personal involvement with his own descendants. Secondly - and this is what he does do -, he can remain involved, even intervening to prevent Alawin from accompanying his half-brothers on their foredoomed attack. He should have consulted Everard. If Carl had not begun that line of descent that led to Hathawulf and Solbern, would two other brothers have come forward to play the same roles and to be given the same names in Germanic literature? Maybe.

In any case, Carl has now involved himself so much that he will have to involve himself further in order to extricate himself from this situation and also to save the day. A further tragic role, implicit from the beginning, now awaits: Odin the traitor.

Wanda Tamberly

In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, Wanda Tamberly appears in:

"The Year of the Ransom"

The Shield Of Time

"Death And The Knight"

However, The Shield... comprises three interconnected stories. Its PARTs ONE, THREE and FIVE are short introductions to its PARTs TWO, FOUR and SIX which are those three interconnected stories.

Wanda Tamberly:

cameos in PART TWO;

is the viewpoint character of PARTs THREE and FOUR;

co-stars with Manse Everard in PART SIX.

Thus, Wanda has had a wealth of time travel and Time Patrol experience before she again cameos in "Death..." and would have remained a major character if the series had continued, especially since she has finally begun a relationship with Everard. SM Stirling reflects this in his continuation story, "A Slip in Time." I would have appreciated at least one more long volume from Anderson.

Where The Time Patrol Series Was Going

Manse Everard is in every Time Patrol story and is usually the central character.

In "The Year of the Ransom," Everard and Wanda Tamberly meet.

In The Shield Of Time, Everard and Tamberly pursue separate careers in the Time Patrol and begin a relationship at the very end of the novel.

In "Death and the Knight," their relationship is still in place. 

That is it for Wanda Tamberly as written by Poul Anderson. 

There are two more things to be said. First, in "A Slip in Time" by SM Stirling, Everard and Tamberly have married but I still wonder what Anderson might have done with the characters if he had continued the series. Secondly, although "Star of the Sea" was written between The Shield... and "Death...," it is set before Everard meets Tamberly and in fact features his brief relationship with Janne Floris. The series became more and more involved and intricate. Anderson could have written more instalments set earlier and thus have delayed describing later developments with Everard and Tamberly.

We would have liked a much longer Time Patrol series.

Red And Gold

"...the sky was ablaze with red and gold streaked across aquamarine.

"...the brilliant shore slip[ped] by across the mother-of-pearl mirror of the sea."

"The yacht...slid quietly across the broad bay, now lemon and gunmetal in the last light, towards the anchorage. The small township beneath the mountains was already dark with indigo shadow in which a sprinkling of yellow lights showed."

I quote these passages because they share the quality of colourful natural description that we regularly find in Poul Anderson's works. However, this is our "other reading" time of the evening. The passages are quoted from:

Ian Fleming, "The Hildebrand Rarity" IN Fleming, For Your Eyes Only (London, 1964), pp. 150-191 AT pp. 187, 189.

How many people associate James Bond with this kind of descriptive prose? And how many also realize that "The Hildebrand Rarity" and a couple of other short stories are not Secret Service adventures but Ian Fleming trying out other kinds of writing albeit with his mascot, 007, remaining on stage?

Flandry is not Bond in space but read both anyway.

The Poignant Chapter

The Boat Of A Million Years, VI, Encounter.

Svoboda has gone to Kiev to be betrothed to the man who will be her fourth husband. She has outlived three and must move from countryside to city to find a fourth. We begin to realize her nature. She is rescued from a street assault by Cadoc/Hanno and Rufus. Rufus has meanwhile lost his right hand in a fight. Immortals' teeth grow back but not hands. We realize that we are reading a serial or series that could have been published as such. Hanno, now Cadoc, and Rufus have become continuing characters and we cannot be shown everything that happens to them over the centuries. Cadoc and Svoboda spend time together, neither realizing that the other is immortal! - although she lets slip something that should have alerted him. We expect that they will meet again.

Chapter VII begins on a facing page and is set only twenty-two years later. Cadoc and Rufus are about to visit a courtesan who we might guess is Aliyat. Maybe the action is speeding up? 

My time is now divided between blogging and reading a book about Jiddu Krishnamurti, which might mean fewer posts for a while. Theosophists believed that the World Teacher who had spoken through Krishna and Jesus also spoke through Krishnamurti, which is relevant to some recent posts.

What people are capable of doing and believing is extraordinary.

Age And Wisdom

World Without Stars.

Age is not wisdom but can be used to become wise. Imagine someone who has been doing that for nearly three millennia. Hugh Valland lives up to our hopes and expectations. When idolized by a mere thirty year old:

"Valland took the situation well, refrained from exploiting or patronizing, and managed to slip him bits of sound advice." (IV, p. 24)

When the Meteor, emerging from a space jump, plunges toward a planet that should not be there but that fills the viewscreen, Captain Argens is paralyzed but Gunner Valland issues the necessary order:

"Then Hugh Valland's tone cut through, sword-like with what I should have cried. 'Pilots! For God's sake, reverse us and blast!'" (V, p. 29)

Argens, jarred from his stupor, scans the meters and takes command. Valland does not mutiny but leads when necessary.

James Blish said in one of his collections of sf criticism - and I am not going to find it at this time of night - that most people, given an indefinitely extended lifespan, would use all that time to become worse specimens than they already were. But some would not. Individuals like Valland would become leaders of mankind, whether formally recognized as such or not.

Near Future Venus

In his Time Patrol series, Poul Anderson avoided giving information about the near future Earth but did impart information about Venus:

"Go back and kill Hitler and the Japanese and Soviet leaders - maybe someone shrewder would take their place. Maybe atomic energy would lie fallow, and the glorious flowering of the Venusian Renaissance never happen. The devil we know...."

-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 3, p. 17.

"Piet Van Sarawak (Dutch-Indonesian-Venusian, early twenty-fourth A.D.)..."

-Poul Anderson, "Delenda Est" IN Time Patrol, pp. 173-228 AT 1, p. 174.

Both these stories were published in 1955. In 1967, a Russian probe showed that Venus was in no shape to be colonized or to flower in a Renaissance any time soon. SM Stirling's "A Slip in Time," published 2014, shows that the Venus that we know had to be drastically terraformed before Van Sarawak could live there in 2332. 

Venus In Two Other Andersonian Futures

In some fictional futures, Venus is inhabited or colonized although we see no action on its surface. However, that planet interacts with others. Thus, in the Time Patrol timeline, a raid from Venus killed Rozher Schtein's family in the thirtieth century and Manson Everard's fellow Unattached Patrol agents include Piet van Sarawak from Venus in the twenty-fourth century. We are not told that Venus had had to be terraformed but see SM Stirling's sequel, "A Slip in Time."

In Anderson's Technic History, Aaron Snelund, who became Governor of Sector Alpha Crucis, grew up in Sub-Lucifer on an incompletely terraformed Venus. (We are told somewhere that the terraforming was incomplete.)

And I think that that's it for other Andersonian versions of Venus unless, of course, you know better.

Addendum the following morning: 

Venus in the Time Patrol timeline has:

Hesperus City

canals

blue twilight

Aphrodite vintages

Time Travel And Future Histories

I prefer time travel to future histories with certain reservations and qualifications. Time travel has to be done very well if it is to be done at all. Thus, Isaac Asimov's time travel novel, The End of Eternity, is so incoherent that it has to rate even lower than his future history.

HG Wells' The Time Machine is a greater and more lasting work than his The Shape of Things to Come despite being much shorter than it. Olaf Stapledon incorporated mental time travel into his future history, Last and First Men, so that, in his case, we do not have to compare two different works.

Poul Anderson presents a long future history series, the Technic History, and a shorter, but still long, time travel series, the Time Patrol. I find more to think about and discuss in the former but there is also another issue here. When a fictional character visits Mars, he remains on a single version of Mars. He does not slip sideways onto an alternative version of that planet. When a time traveller visits the past, I want him to remain in the single real past, not to slip sideways into a divergent or alternative past. The fundamental premise of the Time Patrol series is a mutable timeline. When Time Patrol agents are in a timeline where Hannibal sacked Rome, they are not in our past, arguably the past. 

From this point of view, Anderson's The Corridors of Time, There Will Be Time and The Dancer from Atlantis are genuine time travel narratives. In The Dancer..., the past seems to have been changed but has not been, which is the cleverest way to do it. However, a circular causality narrative is closed whereas a future history is open-ended.

Logic And Time Travel

"'How does time travel work, anyway? Impossible and absurd, I've read.'

"He nodded. 'According to today's physics and logic, that's true. They'll learn better in the future."

-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 1987 A. D., p. 27.

Time travel is not impossible according to logic which is merely consistency between propositions and is equally necessary whether we are discussing hypothetical time travel or anything else. Example: a man begins a lecture on Greek philosophy by stating that Socrates was executed in 399 BC and ends his lecture by reminding us that Socrates was executed in 299 BC. When challenged on the inconsistent dates, he apologizes for a slip of the tongue and clarifies that 399 BC is the correct date. However, imagine that, instead, he says, "I transcend logic and am entitled to contradict myself." No one does say such a thing and, if anyone did, then he would not succeed in telling us when Socrates was executed. There is no contradiction between the statements that I appeared in ancient Greece and that I disappeared in contemporary Britain.

Everard And Women

Everard has sex with two women in "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks." That is a lot for him but they are integral to the plot. To make contacts in Tyre, he visits the Temple of Asherat. Later, he accepts royal hospitality. He accepts similar hospitality in "Brave To Be A King" but not in "Delenda Est."

Everard's relationship with Cynthia Cunningham ended after she had met Keith Denison. His relationship with Janne Floris begins and ends in "Star of the Sea." He meets Wanda Tamberly in "Year of the Ransom." Their relationship begins in The Shield of Time and continues in "Death and the Knight" and they are married in SM Stirling's "A Slip in Time."

That is all. The main interest in the Time Patrol series is not on Everard's personal relationships.

Where The Time Patrol Goes

A short while ago, I summarized the contents of Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series but missed some points so here we go again:

(i) Manse Everard's early Time Patrol career, beginning with his recruitment, training, first case and promotion to Unattached status and ending with the Carthaginian crisis (four episodes);

(ii) turning points in the lives of two other Patrol agents, Tom Namura and Carl Farness (two);

(iii) "Star of the Sea" as a turning point for Manse Everard because he begins and ends a relationship with Janne Floris and will shortly meet Wanda Tamberly (one);

(iv) the four-phase War against the Exaltationists, involving Wanda Tamberly in its second phase (three);

(v) Wanda Tamberly's Time Patrol career (two);

(vi) an interruption to Everard's and Tamberly's holiday in San Francisco (one).

Comments

The Patrol could have contacted Everard after, instead of during, the holiday.

Everard and Tamberly are married in SM Stirling's "A Slip in Time."

The series goes somewhere and could have gone further.

Addendum: See revision here.

Judas And A Prayer

Starfarers, 40.

Biblical references slip past us especially when they are ones that have become embedded in the language but I have said this before. See It's That Man Again. This time, when Cleland realizes what Brent's mutiny will entail and counter-mutinies, Brent calls him "'You Judas...'" (p. 378) Right...

Cleland had prayed to the dead Jean Kilbirnie:

"'Jean, Jean, forgive me...'" (39, p. 377)

"Air stirred, a barren tiny noise among the shadows.

"'What to do, Jean?  What would you have done?'

"Odd, how soon the answer came." (ibid.)

The answer comes from within Cleland but the "...barren tiny noise..." of the air sounds like that "...still small voice..." which is another Biblical reference.

Does Jean answer Cleland?

Marriage In Genre Fiction

Traditionally,  a hero and heroine married at the end of a novel and lived happily ever after in subsequent volumes, if any, to be separated only by death, which could happen. Dornford Yates's Richard Chandos was widowed and remarried. However, Yates's Boy Pleydell, reflecting the author's experience, was divorced and remarried but the divorce occurred discretely between volumes and was never discussed or explained.

Some heroes are unsuited to the combination of marriage and continued adventures so their authors arrange their fictional biographies accordingly. In the case of Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry:

Kathryn McCormac would not leave her husband even for Flandry;

Kossara Vymezal was murdered;

Flandry and Miriam Abrams did marry but later.

Would Manse Everard and Wanda Tamberly have married if Anderson had continued the Time Patrol series? They were moving in that direction but almost inperceptibly. SM Stirling assumes their marriage in his sequel, "A Slip in Time."

In adventure fiction, the characters, even if married, would escape the mundane fate that might be explored in a mainstream novel:

 

"'Isn't that how marriages work? The days go by and you settle into a routine and piece by piece everything is taken away from you until there are two complete strangers sitting in the same room.'"

-Anthony Horowitz, Forever And A Day (London, 2018), 14, p. 158.

Sequels

Is it possible for one author to write an appropriate sequel to another author's novel? Yes. The Night Of The Triffids by Simon Clark is an excellent continuation and resolution of John Wyndham's narrative. Has any author written an acceptable sequel to a work by Poul Anderson? Read Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds (see here) and judge. Although I think that SM Stirling's Time Patrol story, "A Slip in Time," is by far the most authentic of the contributions in this anthology, none strikes me as the way Anderson himself would have continued the series but that is a tall order.

Time Patrol Mistakes?

In 1894, Mainwethering in the Time Patrol London office briefs agents Everard and Whitcomb concerning a stolen time machine which was:

"'Finally recovered from fifth-century England by two Patrolmen named, haw! Everard and Whitcomb.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 4, p. 28.

They have already recovered the time machine because it is recorded that they completed this task in the fifth century but they have not yet recovered it in terms of their own experience.

In 1980, Carl Farness reflects:

"Looking at [Everard's] dark, bowed head, I had the eerie knowledge that he must have read everything I would write. He knew my personal future as I did not - as I would not until I had been through it. The rule is very seldom waived that keeps an agent from learning his or her destiny; a causal loop is the least undesirable thing that could all too easily result."
-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Time Patrol, pp. 333-465 AT 1980, p. 385.

Mainwethering has not revealed Everard's or Whitcomb's destinies by letting slip that they have recovered or will recover (depending on which way you look at it) the stolen time machine but he has probably broken a rule, nevertheless. Somewhere else, and I cannot find this passage right now, Everard says that Patrolmen carry out each mission in as linearly causational a way as possible, avoiding foreknowledge.

Everard's conversations with Mainwethering raise other issues which have been discussed before but which seem ever new.

But There Is More...

See:

Multiverse: The Man Who Came Late
Holger's Personal Quest
Something Or Somebody
Inter-Cosmic Moralities
Finding Out For Sure?

When I said here that "...unfortunately, that is the last that we see of either Holger or Valeria...," I referred, of course, to works by Poul Anderson. We are all free to imagine sequels and even to write fanfic. Published authors are those who have been able to sell their imaginings.

Holger and Alianora do reappear in "The Man Who Came Late" by Harry Turtledove but each reader must judge whether he regards such a sequel as a valid addition to the canon. I am not sure about fully accepting any of the sequels in Multiverse, even the best of them, which is undoubtedly "A Slip In Time" by SM Stirling.

 In the interests of thoroughness, I will shortly reread "The Man Who Came Late" to reassess where I think it fits in the fictional multiverse. After all, the multiverse concept enables us to consider alternative sequels as maybe happening in divergent timelines.

Masters Of The Imagination

Who have we celebrated and compared recently?

Poul Anderson
HG Wells
Olaf Stapledon
CS Lewis
James Blish
Neil Gaiman
SM Stirling

A few noteworthy points:

Lewis replied to the secularism of Wells and Stapledon;

Blish's After Such Knowledge is post-Lewis and even cites what that which called itself Screwtape let slip to Lewis!;

Lewis, Anderson, Gaiman and Stirling excel at journeys between worlds;

I particularly like Stirling's Conquistador with its Gates taking his characters to new adventures on unpolluted Earths;

Anderson fully develops Wellsian time travel, continues Stapledonian cosmological sf and respects Lewisian issues even in his hard sf.

What's not to like?

Bid Time Return II

When I wrote here that authors can make time return, I meant, first, that they can write not only sequels but also prequels and, secondly, that series episodes which are written later can nevertheless be set earlier. Ian Fleming never did this. Each new James Bond novel was meant to be set after the previous one and in the present. For other approaches, see Alternative Reading Orders.

Poul Anderson referred to Adzel's student days in an action-adventure story published in an sf magazine in 1965, then described those days in a juvenile short story published in an original anthology in 1974.

After the publication of the long Time Patrol novel, The Shield Of Time:

the short Time Patrol novel, "Star of the Sea," was first published in the comprehensive omnibus collection, The Time Patrol, later Time Patrol;

the Time Patrol short story, "Of Death And The Knight," was published in an original anthology about the Knights Templar, then later incorporated into Time Patrol.

Manse Everard of the Patrol meets Wanda Tamberly in "The Year of The Ransom," begins a relationship with her at the end of The Shield Of Time and continues that relationship in "Of Death And The Knight" (and is married to her in "A Slip In Time" by SM Stirling). Thus, "Of Death And The Knight" not only was written after The Shield Of Time but also is a sequel to it. Indeed, it is a direct sequel because the events of "Of Death And The Knight" interrupt a holiday begun at the end of The Shield Of Time.

However, "Star of the Sea" describes Everard's relationship with Janne Floris. Anderson wants this relationship to have begun and ended before Everard meets Wanda and the dates as given in "Star of the Sea" clearly indicate that this is the case. Thus, this story not only presents Everard reminiscing about his personal past but also gives its readers information about a period of his career that is earlier than some that we have already read. Still earlier episodes could have been written but unfortunately were not.

Despite all this looking back, we also want to know what happens next, in particular what happens when Everard has to wind up his twentieth century persona that has lived in a New York apartment for so many decades. Would he, like the Farnesses, simply relocate to a still earlier decade of the twentieth century? And what happens after that, if he continues to live indefinitely as Time Patrol agents can?

Perish by the Sword: A Review by Nygel G. Harrot

The pen is mightier than the sword… Or is it?

Does Poul pull off a murder mystery as well as dear old Agatha or is the sword in the title really just a blunt knife?

Now, I must admit that this is the first Poul Anderson book that I have in fact read. I have not yet traveled the depths of time with him via the Time Patrol series.

 As a follower of good mysteries containing bodies on vicars’ hearth rugs I thought I would try this well known author from the 50s onwards, despite a word from Mr. Paul Shackley  that, for him, this was not one of his favorite Poul books. (The sword stays firmly in the time period that it is set in and does not slip into a different stream or dimension of history, past or future.)

To be honest, I set up my camp with Mr Shackley, although a few tents along.

The mystery was solid.

The writing very good.

The words used created the atmosphere and the feel of the late 1950s (the book itself was written in 1959 and was the winner of the ‘Cock Robin’ mystery award).

But for me the problem was the bit between the lines. The feel of the characters and situation as I took my eyes off the page and turned it. They were lost to me until I hooked onto the words again.

If an Agatha Christie story was a painting, it would be a fine line drawing shaded with water colour pencils containing the odd patch of heavy red. Poul’s, on the other hand, would be a solid ink illustration, logically made up of thick firm black lines. With no shading.

After the sword had been wielded for the last time, after the culprit had been revealed, after the book had been closed, I didn’t have the feel of heart to want to join some of them again for the two follow up books (Murder in Black Letter and Murder Bound).

A solid read. But without the depth of characters that I can connect with.
5 out of 10.