Multiverse: First Impressions

Greg Bear and Gardner Dozois, Editors, Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds (Burton MI, 2014).

To my considerable surprise, this new anthology contains no less than three Time Patrol stories:

"A Slip in Time" by SM Stirling;
"Christmas in Gondwanaland" by Robert Silverberg;
"The Far End" by Larry Niven.

So far today, I have read through "A Slip..." once, have read part of "Christmas..." and have yet to tackle "...End."

A while back, I set out my understanding of time travel here and here.

I am beginning to realize that not all of us have the same idea about what goes on in the Time Patrol universe! That is hardly surprising. I will discuss these three stories, then other items in Multiverse, over a number of posts, beginning with initial impressions.

SM Stirling writes in an afterword that Poul Anderson's Vault Of The Ages:

"...introduced me to the solidity of his world-building, something you could taste and smell and feel, and the way his characters inhabited their own reality, and also the mixture of hope and tragic stoicism that marked his universe." (p. 91)

There are four points here:

"...solidity..." I have tried to convey this by over-using the adjective "substantial."
"...taste and smell and feel..." Anderson often appealed to several senses in descriptive passages.
"...their own reality..." We feel that Anderson's fictitious futures are real places inhabited by people who experience their environments as concretely as we experience ours.
"...hope and tragic stoicism..." I have maybe highlighted this less but it is a recurrent theme -

- the Terran Empire will fall but there are hopeful signs that civilization will continue in some places or can be restored;
Time Patrolmen must endure history and know that, despite longevity treatment, each of them will die but nevertheless humanity will be transcended.

The Time Patrol's variable reality is subtle. At any moment of his existence, Manson Everard experiences one timeline and refers to others. Even though the others are said not to exist, they are related to each other successively and causally, e.g. in "Delenda Est":

timeline 1 in which Rome won the Second Punic War;
timeline 2 in which Neldorians intervened so that Carthage won that war;
timeline 3 in which the Patrol counter-intervened so that Rome won the war.

Neldorians traveled pastwards along timeline 1 and initiated timeline 2. Everard and Van Sarawak traveled pastwards along timeline 1, futurewards into timeline 2, then pastwards along timeline 2 and initiated timeline 3.

At each stage, a time traveler exists in only one timeline unless and until he initiates another timeline. Then, he exists in that second timeline unless and until he initiates a third. While in a "timeline 2," he cannot travel pastwards and arrive in a "timeline 1," yet this happens in "Christmas..." Everard and his companion travel pastwards from the twentieth century of a timeline in which the Patrol exists to the geological past of a timeline in which the Patrol was prevented from existing.

In "A Slip...," Manse and Wanda travel directly from the 2332 AD of a "timeline 1" to the 1926 AD of a "timeline 2." I think that, to arrive in a timeline 2, they would have had to travel pastwards along timeline 1 to some time before the moment of change, then futurewards again, as in "Delenda Est."

One last first impression for this post. In "Christmas...," Everard recalls:

"His rescue of Tom Nomura's girlfriend back in the early Pliocene, just as the Mediterranean was getting born." (p. 218)

But Tom, not Manse, saved Tom's girlfriend - unless Manse recalls a different timeline?

Exploring "A Slip In Time"

Rereading "A Slip In Time" by SM Stirling, I am again struck by what I think is an inconsistency alluded to here. When discussing the Time Patrol universe, we must get used to referring to more than one timeline even if we buy into the Patrol idea that only one exists. Some other timelines are remembered and have a causal relationship to whatever is regarded as the current/existent timeline.

In this sense, "A Slip In Time" refers to at least two timelines. In the timeline guarded by the Patrol (timeline 1):

in 1914, there is an assassination in Sarajevo;
in 1926, Vienna is part of a Europe in which World War I had ended eight years previously;
in 2332, Venus has been terraformed and colonized.

In the second timeline (timeline 2):

in 1914, there is no assassination in Sarajevo;
in 1926, Vienna is part of an Austro-Hungarian Empire that had not had a World War I;
in 2332, Venus has not been terraformed or colonized.

In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, and I think that this also makes sense logically, Manse and Wanda Everard would be able to travel from the 2332 of timeline 1 to a pre-1914 date in timeline 1, then futureward to the 1926 of timeline 2. Instead, however, Stirling has them traveling directly from the 2332 of timeline 1 to the 1926 of timeline 2. If they travel pastward from 2332, timeline 1, and stop in 1926, then it should be the 1926 of timeline 1, not 2.

"A Slip In Time"

We have seen that:

Poul Anderson is a master of sf in general and of time travel fiction in particular;

SM Stirling is a master of alternative history fiction, having written many novels and even series in this specific sub-genre;

Anderson wrote two short stories of realistic alternative history fiction;

however, Anderson's main vehicle for discussing and demonstrating realistic alternative histories is his Time Patrol time travel series;

Stirling has written one Time Patrol short story, "A Slip In Time," which presents an alternative history.

Thus, "A Slip In Time" seems to qualify as a synthesis of the best features of both Stirling and Anderson? It is a story that warrants rereading and further discussion on this blog but first your blogger will finish reading and discussing Stirling's Draka alternative history series volume I for the first time.

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?

Continuing The Time Patrol Series?

Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series has a futuristic hard sf premise:

time travel will be discovered in the galactic era of 19352 AD;
time travelers from then and later regularly visit earlier centuries.

Despite the futurity of the premise, the convention is quickly established that each story is set in a different period of our past. Even if every new author were to accept this convention, the setting for their stories would still be all of history and prehistory. But there are also over a million years of future history followed by the mystery of our evolutionary descendants, the Danellians. Also, new authors might find new slants on the time travel paradoxes.

What must be avoided is any blatant inconsistency in presenting the paradoxes. I think that Anderson does commit some inconsistencies but he conceals them skilfully. Logic is no different in time travel narratives than in linear narratives. However, disrupting chronological relationships confuses readers about logical relationships.

Logic, contra Mr Spock, is not absence of emotion but the kind of consistency between propositions without which we would not succeed in saying anything. Thus, everyone accepts logic without necessarily recognizing it as such. Everyone accepts that, if he contradicts himself in conversation, whether through a slip of the tongue, lapse of memory etc, then he should correct the contradiction. No one says, "Yes, I began my talk on Greek philosophy by stating that Socrates was executed in 399 BC and I ended this same talk by stating that Socrates was executed in 299 BC. I recognize that these statements are contradictory. However, I transcend logic. Therefore, I am not bound by the rules of logic." And, if anyone did say such a thing, then he would not succeed in telling us when Socrates was executed. In this sense of verbal consistency, it is perfectly logical to respond, e.g., with fear when threatened. The fact that fear is an emotion does not invalidate the logical connection between, e.g., seeing and avoiding a threat.

There is a perfect example in the works of another author. Ian Fleming tells us:

(i) in Casino Royale, that James Bond worked for British Intelligence before the War;
(ii) in You Only Live Twice, that Bond joined the Navy, and thus Intelligence, only during the War and then only by lying about his age.

(ii) contradicts (i). It is possible, and is the case, that both statements are made but it is impossible that both are true. There are at least three possibilities:

Fleming forgot what he had written earlier;
he remembered but did not care - "It's only fiction!";
he did explain the contradiction - You Only Live Twice also states that a former colleague and friend of Commander Bond had written several inaccurate popular accounts of his exploits. Thus, all previous volumes can be retroactively reclassified as fictions within the fiction.

But, whether the contradiction is unnoticed, downplayed or explained, it remains a contradiction: (i) and (ii) remain incompatible.

What does this have to do with time travel? Everything. A time travel narrative is more complicated but should be no less consistent. There are two scenarios: time travelers either can or cannot "change the past." When Anderson writes a "cannot" scenario, then his narratives are fully consistent. It is the "can" scenario that implies contradiction: an event occurred but a time traveler prevents it, therefore it did not occur. However, there is no contradiction between saying that the event occurred in timeline 1 and that it was prevented in timeline 2.

There is another possible explanation of the time traveler's experience: there is a single timeline in which the time traveler prevents the event so it does not occur and his memories of it are spurious. Anderson's Time Patrol series is ambiguous between many successive timelines and a single discontinuous timeline.

Anyone who writes additional Time Patrol stories must at least capture the subtlety of what Anderson does write about causality violations and also, hopefully, elucidate it further.  

Some Details In "A Slip In Time"

See here.

(i) SM Stirling addresses some issues that had not arisen in Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories. I had thought that Patrol timecycles were limited to any point on or above Earth or in Earth orbit but Stirling shows us one making an interplanetary crossing. He adds that the cycle has "...four-tenths charge on the cells..." (Multiverse, p. 73). Until now, we might have been forgiven for thinking that timecycles could function indefinitely without needing to be recharged.

So how do the Exaltationists, criminals who have stolen timecycles and fled into space-time, get their vehicles recharged? I suggest that they buy whatever they need from the Neldorian bandits of the two hundred and fifth millennium.

(ii) Manse refers to Hitler, Stalin and Stantel V (p. 77). All these names should be familiar to us. Coordinator Stantel V was the Great Experimenter whose colonies reproduced past societies in the thirty eighth century ("Delenda Est" IN Time Patrol, p. 180).

(iii) On p. 72 of Multiverse, Wanda loses track of how many altered realities Manse has seen. They are four:

the Carthaginian timeline in "Delenda Est";
the alpha and beta timelines in The Shield Of Time;
this new timeline in "A Slip In Time."

(iv) A time travel story such as this involves both thought about time travel logic and knowledge of history. The author must know the history in order to know how to distort it. Unfortunately, my knowledge of the historical details is slight so I must rely on the author.

Multiverse And The Time Patrol

Greg Bear and Gardner Dozois, Editors, Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds (Burton, MI, 2014).

Three stories in Multiverse refer to the Time Patrol:

"A Slip in Time" by SM Stirling;
""Christmas in Gondwanaland" by Robert Silverberg;
"The Far End" by Larry Niven.

I partially discussed these stories in my first three posts about this new anthology. Of the three:

Stirling's is closest to being an authentic continuation, although I noted some differences from Anderson's approach;
Niven's is in Niven's style and, I think, is set in a different universe where there just happen to be beings called Danellians and an organization called the Time Patrol;
I have some problems with the time travel logic of all three stories and, so far, this has prevented me from continuing to read Silverberg's.

Any time travel story raises the questions:

Is the story internally consistent?
Does its plot follow from or contradict its premises?

If the story addresses the circular causality paradox, then it can be fully consistent. I have cited examples on the Logic of Time Travel blog. (See here.) If instead the story addresses the causality violation paradox, then life is more difficult. The first problem is that the most fundamental premises of the Time Patrol series are, first, that causality can be violated and, secondly, that an organization is necessary to prevent this from happening. Throughout history, behind the scenes, professionals equipped with far future technologies and weapons labor tirelessly to ensure that Socrates is executed in 399 BC, that William of Normandy conquers England in 1066 AD, that World War I begins in 1914 etc.

The second problem is that Anderson's rationale for this scenario is subtle and distinctive. New writers have two problems: how to maintain their own internal consistency and also how to remain consistent with what Anderson wrote. When thinking about the Patrol, we have to get used to thinking about alternative timelines and about how these timelines relate to each other. The question of whether and in what sense these timelines exist or are real is important but can sometimes be sidelined while we focus on their relationships. Thus,  "Delenda Est" presents three successive timelines:

a timeline without a particular Neldorian intervention;
a timeline with that intervention;
a timeline with the Neldorian intervention but also a Patrol counter-intervention.

I call these timelines "successive" because there is between them a temporal relationship of before and after, of first, second and third, and even of cause and effect.

Silverberg introduces the idea that the Patrol was founded at a conference way back on the original single continent, Gondwanaland. Alright so far but what happens next? Imagine two timelines:

(i) the familiar timeline guarded by the Patrol;
(ii) an alternative timeline in which every human being at that conference was assassinated while in Gondwanaland so that no Patrol was ever founded.

How can Time Patrolman Everard travel from the twentieth century of (i) to the Gondwanaland of (ii)? According to Anderson, he must travel back along (i) until a time before the assassinations, then forwards into (ii). According to Silverberg, he can jump directly from twentieth century (i) to Gondwanaland (ii). That is certainly inconsistent with Anderson and I cannot see that it is internally coherent either. 

Perceptions Of Time

Anyone able to travel through time would be bound to perceive time differently. Traveling by car, bus or train, I can revisit the town and county where I spent my childhood but, traveling on a Time Patrol timecycle, I would also be able to revisit the period of my childhood. So it would not really be past.

But there are even greater differences for Time Patrol agents. Some of the experiences that they remember did not happen, at least not in the current timeline, and some of the events that they investigate may have causes that are also not in the current timeline.

"You didn't age in the Patrol and you never got sick..."
-SM Stirling, "A Slip In Time" IN Multiverse, p. 73.

Not aging, you would lose any sense of personal duration. Some remembered experiences would be longer ago than others but you would not have aged in any way since experiencing them. Remembering an experience from decades ago, I reflect on how young I was then but this sense of increasing age would no longer exist. And it sounds as if Patrol agents do not retire but continue working indefinitely. Their careers have not a finite duration with an end point but a sort of timeless present.

"Maybe returning to New York on the day after he left it had been a mistake."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time, p. 3.

Imagine being able to spend weeks in Tyre but then return to New York on the day after you left it - and also being able to control exactly how much time had elapsed between departure and return. Surely time itself would begin to seem unreal?

A Patrol agent would be able to strand an enemy, say a Neldorian, in the remote past, not think about him for say five decades, then:

decide to leave the Neldorian back in the past or
retrieve him from the moment when he had been deposited in the past or
check on his progress five decades after he had been left in the past or
check on his progress at any point between zero and five decades.

It is as if the Neldorian is frozen in the past. He is not but that is how it would seem. Again, would Patrollers be able to retain any sense of time as a reality? They know that they will die some day but not of old age so they have no idea of how near their deaths may be. Their lives just continue, although not in a linear chronological sequence, until they stop.

Subjectivity

"...what he needed was not surcease but the completion of the hunt." (Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time, p. 8.)

"The hunter awoke in Everard. A chill tingle passed through his spine, out to scalp and fingertips." (p. 305)

"Again the hunter's tingle went through his skin and along his backbone." (p. 327)

"A scent came down the time-winds, that of maneater.
"'Time to hunt,' [Everard] said."
-SM Stirling, "A Slip In Time" IN Multiverse, p. 91.

(I thought that Anderson also had a reference to "maneater" but have not found it on rereading.) (Addendum, 30 Aug 2015: "Most of [Everard] stood in a wind down which blew the scent of tiger...maneater." -The Shield Of Time, p. 75)

Everard brings primitive feelings and motivations to the high tech business of time travel. Guion seeks a higher level of experiential comprehension:

"'What is involved is no more amenable to symbolic logic than is the concept of mutable reality. 'Intuition' or 'revelation' are words equally inadequate.'" (The Shield Of Time, p. 7)

Although I apply logic to time travel, I find Anderson's texts consistently elusive, especially when the excellent "Star Of The Sea" is taken into account. Suppose the Patrol really is encountering something like a singularity that defies analysis and intellectual understanding? They perceive it in terms of time travel paradoxes because they have to perceive it somehow. Babylonians at the Patrol Academy had to be given a battle of the gods routine.

Lastly, for tonight, in addition to the time criminals and opponents listed in a recent post, another potential collective villain is suggested. Possibly, in a divergent timeline:

"'...the entire world that brought you and me into being is a phantom, a might-have-been, which, conceivably, an alternate Time Patrol keeps suppressed.'" (p. 76)

The Patrol might have to fight another Patrol to restore the Danellian timeline.

Multiverse: A Slip In Time

Greg Bear and Gardner Dozois, Editors, Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds (Burton, MI, 2014).

At the climax of "A Slip in Time" by SM Stirling, Manson Everard, knowing (apparently) that Wanda Everard on a timecycle will see him do it, jumps from a gondola. There are two possibilities:

(i) Wanda sees Manse falling, space-time jumps to a point beneath him and catches him;
(ii) Wanda sees Manse fall to his death, space-time jumps five minutes pastward and to a different point in space and catches him.

(ii) is what happens. In fact, she dives the timecycle to catch him rather than appear beneath him. Apart from this difference, the Manse whom Wanda catches experiences (i), although Wanda has experienced (ii). This is logically odd, to say the least. There is a Manse who experiences a fall to his death. The Manse whom Wanda has saved seems fully to accept this:

"'I had to watch you die, you son of a bitch!' Wanda yelled...
"'Not permanently,' he grinned..." (p. 90)

Not permanently? A version of Manse did die permanently but he experienced only a few more seconds of falling, then nothing. I think that it is out of character for Manson Everard to pull such a stunt. He usually accepts that the Patrol dead stay dead.

Stirling shows us two couples, Van Sarawak and Deirdre, Manse and Wanda, married, with children. This is a logical development, of course, but I do not think that Anderson would have moved his characters' lives forward that fast if he had been able to continue the series. Stirling also brings back Komozino whereas Anderson usually changed the supporting cast.

Anderson had Everard consulting the physician Kwei-Fei Mendoza on the Moon in 2319. Stirling has the Everards visiting the Van Sarawaks on Venus in 2332, only thirteen years later. These are the only two times in the entire series when we see Everard travel any further futureward than the twentieth century.

Exploring "A Slip In Time" II

See here.

Manse is captured in 1926, timeline 2, whereas Wanda has fled through time and space to 180 AD, pre-divergence. She thinks:

"Other agents would be heading futureward 'now', for a value of 'now' that only the Temporal language could express, across the wave-front of actuating upheaval. They'd see the altered future; some of them would flit straight back downtime. They'd gather, assess the situation, and then they'd act."
-SM Stirling, "A Slip In Time" IN Greg Bear and Gardner Dozois, Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds (New York, 2014), pp. 63-91 AT p. 73.

I disagree. Most, possibly all, time travelers, including Time Patrollers, who traveled from the post-1914 timeline 1 into pre-1914 eras returned futureward into timeline 1. Wanda herself has done this several times, as has Manse etc. Two possibilities:

if no one has traveled futureward into timeline 2, then Wanda and Manse are alone in knowing about that altered timeline - apart from the time criminal who caused it, of course;

if say one or two Time Patrol agents have traveled into timeline 2, then they should act as Wanda thinks they will and enlist help from some other agents in the past while trying not to disrupt the course of events too much in the process.

There is one other factor here. If, e.g., one Patrol agent traveled futureward into timeline 2, then s/he did not return as planned to timeline 1 so some colleagues should have investigated and might have identified the problem?

However, no agents setting out to travel pastwards along timeline 1 from a post-1914 date to an earlier post-1914 should have arrived in timeline 2.

Hypothetical Sequels

My ideas for a sequel to The Time Machine are here.

How might Poul Anderson have continued his Time Patrol series? Manse Everard would have had to leave that New York apartment and to move elsewhere/when and his relationship with Wanda Tamberly would have had to go somewhere, possibly towards marriage, as in SM Stirling's "A Slip In Time." (see here.)

Beyond that, each Time Patrol installment has been unique and unpredictable. For present purposes, I will count The Shield Of Time as three installments. Thus, the entire series comprises thirteen installments of two kinds:

those in which the Patrol contends with human villains/time criminals;
those in which the Patrol must address some other kind of problem generated by time travel.

The stories with villains are a minority and maybe develop the idea as far as it will go:

an individual villain (one story);
a collective villain (one story);
a more sophisticated collective villain (three stories).

For readers who enjoy heroic detective work followed by heroes versus villains action, there is plenty of that in these stories. In the remaining eight installments:

Patrol Specialist Keith Denison unintentionally becomes Cyrus the Great;
the Mongols threaten to invade North America;
a Patrol agent saves the life of a colleague who, according to the records, never returned home;
a Patrol agent mistaken for Wodan must betray his followers to preserve history;
a Patrol agent unintentionally inspires a pagan prophetess who will change history unless the Patrol counterintervenes;
a Patrol agent intervenes to help the Beringians;
a medieval man is a personal causal nexus;
an indiscreet Patrolman is arrested by the Knights Templar.

Any fourteenth installment would probably have been of the second kind but there is no way to project either its plot or its historical setting.

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.

Successors And The Time Patrol

SM Stirling is:

"Considered by many to be the natural heir to Harry Turtledove's title of King of the Alternate History..."
-Introduction to SM Stirling, "A Slip In Time" IN Greg Bear and Gardner Dozois, Eds., Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds (Burton, MI, 2014), p. 63.

I can see that this is so although I came to Stirling as a successor of Poul Anderson, not of Harry Turtledove. In Multiverse, Stirling's addition to Anderson's Time Patrol series follows Turtledove's sequel to Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions.

"In most [Time Patrol stories] , Time Patrolman Manse Everard and his compatriots ride off to keep unscrupulous time-travelers from destroying the proper timeline by changing historic events in the past." (op. cit., p. 64)

Not in most.

"Time Patrol" - Stane tries to change history.
"Brave To Be A King" - Everard rescues Keith Denison.
"The Only Game In Town" - the Patrol changes history.
"Delenda Est" - Neldorians change history.
"Gibraltar Falls" - another Time Patrolman rescues a colleague.
"The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" - a Patrolman risks changing history.
"Star of the Sea" - the Patrol inadvertently nearly changes history.
"The Year Of The Ransom" - Exaltationists threaten to change history.
"Ivory, And Apes, And Peacocks" - another Exaltationist threat.
The Shield Of Time -
the Patrol traps the remaining Exaltationists;
Time Patrolwoman Wanda Tamberly meddles in the past;
history changes without human intervention.
"Death And The Knight" - Everard rescues another Patrolman.

Undated SF

Science fiction can become dated but remain worth reading, e.g., The Time Machine and The War Of The Worlds. It is good when a science fiction writer sometimes gets part of the future right. Heinlein had mobile phones, water beds and waldos. The last are named from Heinlein's novel.

Skillful sf writers can also avoid writing texts that date too quickly. Although Poul Anderson wrote his Time Patrol series from 1955 to 1995, he carefully avoided describing the near future. Gorbachev is mentioned in a novel dated 1991 but no political leader of the 1990's had been named before then. In the opening story, an instructor at the Time Patrol Academy in the Oligocene demonstrates:

"...the gadgets in a typical room. They were the sort you would have expected by, say, A.D. 2000: unobtrusive furniture readily adjusted to a perfect fit, refresher cabinets, screens which could draw on a huge library of recorded sight and sound for entertainment. Nothing too advanced, as yet."
-Poul Anderson, Time Patrol (New York, 2006), p. 8.

Indeed. This group of cadets has been recruited from 1850-2000. Some of them will already be familiar with these domestic gadgets. The others can be introduced to them. Whitcomb from 1947 and Everard from 1954 will have less difficulty than their colleagues from the 1850's. One girl with "...iridescent, close-fitting culottes...green lipstick...fantastically waved yellow hair..." (p. 6) sounds familiar from later in the century. Is she "...the girl from 1972...a rising young physicist in her own period..." (p. 9) who speaks up later?

In Anderson's "Delenda Est" (1955), Piet Van Sarawak is from Venus whereas, in SM Stirling's "A Slip in Time" (2014), he is from a terraformed Venus, not contradicting but completing Anderson. In a timeline without the terraforming, the acidic Venerian environment would boil lead.

"A Slip In Time": Conclusion

I have finished rereading SM Stirling's "A Slip In Time."

(i) I am not sure how Manse knew Wanda was near enough to rescue him when he made his suicide jump?

(ii) There is rather an abrupt transition to 18,244 BC and to Komozino's account of her restoration of the Sarajevo assassination without as yet apprehending the criminal(s).

(iii) Stirling confirms that Everard sometimes works in his future, in this case in Istanbul, 2043. But that is not very far uptime as these things go. It would not be necessary to cope with the bigger changes of hundreds or thousands of years.

(iv) Wanda thinks that:

"...the world around her and herself and Manse could - very well might - just stop at any instance." (Multiverse, pp. 82-83)

I have responded to this thought quite often by now. Wanda has seen this "...world around her..." still in existence four hundred years later. Komozino's restoration of the Sarajevo assassination generates the Patrol's preferred history with World War I beginning in 1914, not a WWI-free timeline persisting into 1926 and stopping then.

I would like to stay with the Time Patrol for a while longer and might reread sections of The Shield Of Time.

Exploring "A Slip In Time" III

See here.

SM Stirling exactly reproduces Manse Everard's way of thinking about variable realty. Trapped and imprisoned in the 1926 of a divergent history, Manse thinks:

"Either a Patrol rescue team would arrive to break him out...or he'd vanish when this world was cancelled." (Multiverse, p. 77)

(For convenience, I am referring to the Patrol timeline and the divergent timeline as timelines 1 and 2, respectively.)

"...when..." does not refer to any temporal coordinate within timeline 2. Timeline 2 either does or does not exist. Since Manse is in it, it does exist. It is a continuum with one temporal and three spatial dimensions. Its spatial dimensions extend to the edge of the universe or around the curve of space or etc. There is no reason to suppose that its temporal dimension does not extend pastward to a Big Bang and futureward to a heat death of the universe. If this timeline ends prematurely before the heat death, then its premature ending is a random event not caused by the activities of any time travelers.

If a time traveler prevents the prevention of the Sarajevo assassination, then the consequence will not be that timeline 2 exists until sometime in or after 1926, then ceases to exist. The consequence will instead be the creation in a second temporal dimension of another four dimensional continuum, this one containing the history guarded by the Patrol. It will be timeline 3, differing in only a few unimportant details from timeline 1.

From the point of view of the inhabitants of timeline 2, timeline 3 exists/will exist (a Temporal language tense is needed) in the future not of timeline 2 but of a second temporal dimension at right angles to timeline 2. Each moment of the second temporal dimension contains a four dimensional continuum just as each moment of the first temporal dimension contains a three dimensional universe.

The continued existence of timeline 2 after its version of 1926 is confirmed on p. 71 when Wanda travels two centuries, then another two centuries, futureward. If Manse is not rescued, then he will not "vanish" but will live the rest of his life in timeline 2. Of course, people in timeline 3 will have no access to Manse and might consider that he has vanished but there will have been no vanishing from his point of view.

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. 

A Recurrent Argument

Regular readers of this blog might have noticed that I have restated a particular argument about time travel several times. In its simplest form, the argument is as follows: if a time traveler departs into the past intending to prevent your birth, you need not fear that you will cease to exist a moment after his departure because, if your birth had been prevented in the past of this timeline, then you would not exist now. You would not somehow exist into adulthood, then cease to exist. There may be only one timeline or there may be one timeline in which you were born and exist and another timeline in which you were not born and do not exist but there cannot be a composite timeline in which you were not born but do exist but then cease to exist.

Why keep repeating an argument especially when, as yet, no one has disagreed with it? Because the argument always seems fresh and relevant, especially when reading or rereading Time Patrol stories. And these stories deserve our respect unlike, e.g., Isaac Asimov's The End Of Eternity. No doubt the blog will move on as it has from previous preoccupations or obsessions but, right now, SM Stirling's Time Patrol story, "A Slip In Time," is a major focus, to be followed by his second Draka novel, Under The Yoke.

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.