Some Parallels

Sometimes the blog focuses on the details of a single fictional timeline whereas, at other times, it broadens out to compare several parallel future histories. Thus, discussion of space sectors in the Terran Empire of the Technic History led to discussion of the Sirian Sector in both the Psychotechnic History and "Flight to Forever."

In the future history of "Flight to Forever," there are at least two Galactic Empires. The First Empire, if not also the Second, has a Space Navy and therefore would also have an Intelligence Corps with agents like Dominic Flandry.

In the timeline of "Flight to Forever," time travel is possible for about seventy years into the past and indefinitely into the future. Therefore, some civilizations might have a Time Patrol to prevent:

attempts to change recent history;

incidents like the Time War when a defeated army attempted to conquer the world a century later.

"Flight to Forever" combines pulp sf with Wellsian themes and with some elegiac passages: see "Flight to Forever," here.

For Wellsian themes, see:

Visions Of The End Of Life On Earth
A Few More Details In The Time Machine
Literature And Time II 

What Happens To Time Travellers?

"Flight to Forever."

So what does happen to time travellers into the future?

"Time travelers were few anyway, the future was too precarious - they were apt to be killed or enslaved in one of the more turbulent periods." (p. 227)

So now we know. Or rather, temporarily suspending disbelief, we know what answer is given in this particular narrative. (It is like asking what Martians are like...)

"Flight to Forever" contains several quotable passages. See also:

A Brief Flash Of Light

Flight To Forever

Flight To Forever II

Flight To Forever III

Non-Human Races

How many non-human races will interact with Earth in its future? In Poul Anderson's "Flight to Forever," (Alight In The Void, New York, 1993):

Ixchulhi conquerors built an enormous stone pyramid that stood for over twenty thousand years;

the Grimmani built the also enormous stone fortress of Brontothor;

Taury's Imperial court included a centauroid, an avian from Klakkahar, a four-armed Haamigurian and the Dreamer;

 

the "gods" of the city were so far beyond mankind that it was irrelevant whether they were our descendents or the outcome of an independent evolution;

Saunders wonders "How many intelligent races had risen on Earth and had their day, and died...?" but concludes "At least...we were the first." (p. 235)

Thus, some non-human races are separated from us not by space but by time. They are not extraterrestrials but extra-temporals.

The Dreamer is the last of the Vro-Hi. In Anderson's Technic Civilization History, we realize that a Galactic Empire would be too impossibly vast to rule and that even the much smaller Terran Empire, only four hundred light years across, cannot really be ruled centrally from Archopolis. However, in "Flight to Forever," "'...the coordination of a billion planets...'" in a single Galactic Empire becomes temporarily possible because of "'...scientific psychodynamics and the great cybernetic engines...'" and the guidance of the old, wise, telepathic Vro-Hi. (p. 214) The Vro-Hi are not just collectively ancient. The Dreamer alone is half a million years old.

"'No other race is intelligent enough to coordinate [the Empire].'" (p. 208)

The Dreamer works on the philosophical basis of the Second Empire just as Asimov's Second Foundation applies psychohistory to project their Second Empire. However, the Dreamer also proves that permanence is self-contradictory so that, "'There can be no goal to reach, not ever.'" (p. 214)

No permanent goal, no.

The Dreamer agrees with the time traveler Saunders that "'To travel hopefully...is better than to arrive.'" (p. 213) CS Lewis commented on this aphorism that, if it were true and were known to be true, then there would be nothing to hope for. But Lewis believed in a permanent goal. Surely for the rest of us there is both constant motion and many inherently valuable moments along the way?

The Vro-Hi "'...achieved a static physical state in which the new frontiers and challenges lay within our own minds...'" and wrongly thought that this ideal should suit all other beings. (p. 213) This same, I think false, dichotomy recurs in Anderson's much later Harvest Of Stars Tetralogy. Integrated intelligences will continue to explore both the endless outer cosmos and mental realms like pure mathematics.

The Dreamer offers to remove the time travelers' "'...little neuroses...'" but Belgotai replies that he likes his. (p. 213) I would have accepted the offer. When painful memories arise during Zen meditation, we neither suppress nor prolong them and do not think about them but let them pass and, until they pass, sit with them. But attention to the present would be facilitated if the memories did not arise.

"Flight to Forever" gives us another reference to the "ultrawave" (p. 216) and a space battle comparable to those in the Technic History. Saunders ironically uses the phrase, "All the time in the world." (p. 188), which is used not in The Time Machine but in one film adaptation of it.

Science fiction hints at some interesting other languages:

Old Solar in CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy;
Temporal in Anderson's Time Patrol series:
Stellarian in "Flight To Forever" -

- languages of the sun, time and stars.

Literature And Time II

Poul Anderson: "Flight to Forever"
The time projector is an enclosed temporal vehicle with subjective passage of time, not instantaneous transition, for its passengers. Thus, it is basically like the TARDIS although cylindrical, not box-shaped. Alone in the projector, Martin Saunders traverses billions of years between:

"The universe was dead!" (p. 284) and:

"The universe was reforming." (p. 285)

Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 207-288.

Between times, he eats one sandwich. The projector can travel pastward for only a few decades so the only way to return home is to continue forward around the circle of time.

Doctor Who
The Doctor and his assistant viewed the asteroidal remnants of Earth, then returned to twenty-first century London to buy bags of chips (French fries).

HG Wells: The Time Machine
The Time Traveler traveled forward to a time when, as the large, red, motionless sun was eclipsed by an inner planet, the already silent Earth -

"'It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives - all that was over.'"
-HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1973), 14 "The Further Vision," p. 94.

- became dark and even colder. The white snow flakes increased, then only the pale stars were visible.

"'So I came back...The blinking succession of the days and nights was resumed, the sun got golden again, the sky blue. I breathed with greater freedom.'"
- 15 "The Time Traveller's Return," p. 95.

"'...that remote and awful twilight...'" (14 "The Further Vision," p. 95) will fall in a remote future but, to the Time Traveler, it is like a place to which he went and from which he returned.

Poul Anderson: "Brave To Be A King"
Time Patrolman Manson Everard travels not to the future but to the past and not to an uninhabitable period but to one that is unbearably alien:

"Overhead he saw a painted roof, where a youth killed a bull, and the Bull was the Sun and the Man. Beyond columns and vines trod guards in dragon-skin mailcoats, their bows strung, their faces like carved wood. The harem wing of the palace could be glimpsed where a hundred or a thousand young women counted themselves fortunate to await the king's occasional pleasure. Beyond the city walls lay harvest fields where peasants readied sacrifice to an Earth Mother who was old in this land when the Aryans came, and that was in a dark predawn past. High over the walls floated the mountains, haunted by wolf, lion, boar, and demon. It was too alien a place. Everard had thought himself hardened to otherness, but now he wanted suddenly to run and hide, up to his own century and his own people and a forgetting."
-Poul Anderson, "Brave To Be A King" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (New York, 2006), pp. 55-112 AT p. 92.

Mountains do not float but Everard is reflecting on how they appear. They are "haunted" by wolf, lion and boar but not literally by demons - but Everard is letting the prevailing worldview get to him. We can think about our own country and people but Everard thinks about "...his own century and his own people..." I do not understand how the Bull is the Sun and the Man but it sounds like religious mysteries that I was told in childhood.

When I read about the Persian Empire in SM Stirling's Island In The Sea Of Time, I consulted Everard's interview with Denison/Cyrus in Anderson's Time Patrol. Everard wanting to flee from alienness back to his own century reminded me of the Time Traveler returning from the "...great darkness..." (p. 94) of his "Further Vision" to the nineteenth century. This is the great literature of time travel.

Past Times: Revised Edition

My proposed revised version of Poul Anderson's Past Times (New York, 1984) would contain:
 

"Wildcat"	Jurassic
"The Nest"	Oligocene
"The Little Monster"	Pleiocene
"The Man Who Came Early"	Vikings
"Welcome"	2497 AD
"Time Heals"	2837 AD
"Flight To Forever"	the circle of time

"Time Patrol" would have made a good concluding story if it were not the opening story of Time Patrol. Past Times introduces time travelers and Time Patrol presents time travelers changing the past.

In "Welcome" (1960),Tom Barlow has gone from 1997 to 2497.

In "Time Heals" (1949), Philip Hart goes from 1952 to 2837 and is about to go further.

In "Flight To Forever" (1950), Martin Saunders goes from 1973 to 2073, then does go further, all the way around time and back to 1973.

I discussed "Flight To Forever" a while back and "Welcome" yesterday. The next task is to compare and contrast "Welcome" and "Time Heals." To start with, I imagine that "superenergy," in "Welcome," and "level-entropy," in "Time Heals," are opposite ways of saying the same thing?

"Flight to Forever" And "Star of the Sea"

 

Two long time travel stories from opposite ends of Poul Anderson's career.

"Flight to Forever," published in Super Science Stories, 1950.

"Star of the Sea," published in Poul Anderson, The Time Patrol (New York, 1991).

"Flight to Forever" is a one-off story published in a pulp magazine whereas "Star of the Sea" is the last long addition to the Time Patrol series, published for the first time in the omnibus collection of the series.

"Flight..." culminates when a single time traveller completes a circuit of the cosmic cycle whereas "Star..." culminates in a prayer focusing imagery associated with a Norse goddess on the Mother of God.

"Flight..." presents future history about a Galactic Empire whereas "Star..." presents past history about the Roman Empire.

"Flight..." recounts a single long journey into the future whereas, in "Star...," two Time Patrol agents travel through several stages of the historical past in search of a crucial event that turns out to be their own arrival in the past. 

Flight To Forever III

I thought that another memorable passage in Poul Anderson's "Flight to Forever" (IN Anderson, Alight In The Void, New York, 1993, pp. 161-240) was:

"'...this last farewell to the days when we fought with our own hands, and fared between the stars, when we were a small band of sworn comrades whose dreams outstripped our strength.'" (p. 226)

Taury the Red, about to assume Galactic Imperial power, feels nostalgic about the days when her small band was almost powerless. Looking ahead, she continues:

"'When you work for a billion stars, you don't have a chance to see one peasant's wrinkled face light with a deed of kindness you did, or hear him tell you what you did wrong - the world will all be strangers to us -'" (ibid.)

Could a high tech interstellar civilization really have a social hierarchy with an Empress at one end and peasants at the other? Surely not. Why do we read such stuff? What we are appreciating here is a fantastic combination of elements from historical fiction and from science fiction. It is like the Tsarist Empire with spaceships, although Anderson's canon does also include both straight historical fiction and serious speculative fiction.

The change in Taury's Imperial status is from de jure to de facto. Earlier:

"'...we are the Empire - legally. Taury is a direct descendant of Maurco the Doomer, last Emperor to be anointed according to the proper forms. Of course, that was five thousand years ago, and Maurco had only three systems left then, but the law is clear. These hundred or more barbarian pretenders, human and otherwise, haven't the shadow of a real claim to the title.'" (p. 205)

But would Galactic Emperors be anointed and hereditary? If so, then any of the pretenders can seize power and start a new dynasty. De jure always begins as de facto. And, as it happens, only an implausible coincidence enables Taury to enforce her claim.

Saunders and Belgotai, time traveling futurewards in their time projector which, like Wells' Time Machine, is confined to a single position on the Earth's surface, stop in 50,000 AD. Over the millennia, the Galactic Imperial capital had been located closer to the Galactic center. However, Taury's father had fled back to the Solar System and had occupied the Terrestrial fortress of Brontothor which happens to have been built, seven millennia earlier, in sight of the location of the time projector. And it is this imported time travel technology that enables Taury's fleet to win a decisive space battle.

Thus, a far more probable scenario would have had the time travellers arriving in 50,000 AD while the seat of Imperial power was still located elsewhere in the Galaxy. Even if it was now in the Solar System, why should it be on Earth, let along in direct line of sight of the arriving time projector?

Some other arrivals also have this convenient coincidental quality, enabling the time travelers instantly to assess the Galactic situation immediately on exiting the projector:

in 4100 AD, they arrive among buildings where a man uses a "psychophone" to greet them with "'Welcome, travelers...'"! (p. 185);

in 4300 AD, they are greeted by young people emerging from summerhouses who regard time travelers as "'...the biggest lark...since the ship came from Sirius...'" (p. 188);

in 4400 AD, a villa burns as "...huge bearded men in helmets and cuirasses..." carry loot and captives to a scarred spaceship (p. 190);

in 25,296 AD, Lord Arsfel of Astracyr from the Galactic Institute has led an archaeological expedition (spaceship parked nearby) to excavate the Ixchulhi pyramid in which the projector had been trapped for twenty thousand years;

in 31,000 AD, they are in a city with a spaceship, yet again, parked nearby and this time there is a Matriarchy;

in 36,000 AD, there is a village with a battered spaceship and a main in Imperial uniform.

On all but one of these dates, as in 50,000 AD, the time travelers are immediately greeted by informative locals. In the remaining case, 4400 AD, they can see at a glance that the barbarians have arrived so that it is prudent to flee.

Wellsian And Stapledonian Anderson

In Poul Anderson's The Shield Of Time, an expedition from the far future travels to the Egyptian Eighteenth Dynasty in search of cultural inspiration. Similarly, I find inspiration among the blog posts of 2012 and 2013, which I currently revisit for "blog maintenance," a worthwhile and enjoyable but also time-consuming behind-the-scenes activity.

I find that I have referred to, but still have never read, The Infinite Voyage by Poul Anderson. See here. That volume has now been ordered. I have read slightly different accounts of its theme but will soon know.

An early work by Anderson that combines pulp absurdities with cosmic grandeur is "Flight to Forever," which is both Wellsian and Stapledonian, a claim often made on this blog. HG Wells introduced the idea of a scientist who invents a temporal vehicle, then sets off into the complete unknown of the future - tomorrow, the day after that and everything beyond them. The author is limited only by his imagination and by what he might extrapolate from history and from his contemporary period. After the introductory passages, the story could move in any direction. Different authors asked to extrapolate from the same opening section of a time travel story would create entirely dissimilar and unrelated narratives.

In "Flight to Forever," Martin Saunders and Sam Hull follow in the Time Traveler's footsteps, starting not from the author's "present" in 1950 but from his near future in 1973. Like the Time Traveler, Saunders returns at the end of the story to the day of his departure. However, like the narrator of Stapledon's Star Maker, Saunders has seen more than the future and end of life on Earth. He also been on a cosmic journey through time and space to the end of the universe. And, unlike Stapledon's narrator, he brings back the memory of a woman, Taury the Red. "Flight to Forever" ends with a sense of cosmic and personal completion.

Takes On Time Travel

It would be true but misleading to say just that Poul Anderson wrote a lot of good time travel fiction. What is "time travel fiction" in some people's heads? Spaceships transport characters to adventures in space or on other planets and, similarly, time machines transport them to adventures in historical or future periods? Like the Time Traveller and the Doctor? Yes, in Anderson's "Flight to Forever," near future characters construct a long, cylindrical "time projector" and, travelling inside this primitive temporal vehicle, they explore the furthest future with several encounters and adventures en route.

But the Time Patrol series is the opposite of all that. A twentieth century man joins a time travelling organization founded in 19352 AD and, working for that organization, the Patrol, he conducts missions in several concretely realized historical periods. In The Corridors Of Time, another twentieth century man is drawn into a time war between two future civilizations whose representatives travel up and down history in corridors rotated onto the temporal axis. In There Will Be Time, a twentieth century man finds that he can time travel by an act of will. And that is not a complete list.

"Flight to Forever" is crude pulp magazine fiction especially when contrasted with the increasingly elaborate and sophisticated Time Patrol series. However, it includes several memorable passages, e.g.:

"...he thought with a sadness of the cities and civilizations he had seen rise and spend their little hour and sink back into the night and chaos of time."

-Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 207-288 AT CHAPTER THREE, p. 238.

"'...this last farewell to the days when we fought with our own hands, and fared between the stars, when we were a small band of sworn comrades whose dreams outstripped our strength.'"

-ibid., CHAPTER SIX, p. 275.

"CREATURE FROM OUT OF TIME, LEAVE THIS PLACE AT ONCE OR THE FORCES WE USE WILL DESTROY YOU!"

-ibid., p. 281.

"So good-by, Sol, he thought. Good-by, and thank you for many million years of warmth and light. Sleep well, old friend." (p. 284)

(Martin Saunders travels further than Wells' Time Traveller.)

And that is a good place to close for this evening.

Ancient Futures

Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 207-288.

Much sf, including the works in question, presents almost a contradictory scenario. On the one hand, a technologically advanced civilization exists in the far future. On the other hand, it is an ancient civilization with an overwhelming sense of a long past. Thus, anyone who time travels into the far future arrives from a far past. The present, of course, is an entirely relative concept. I know that this is obvious but I am trying to articulate the contrasting connotations involved.

Also, with the mere passage of time, any work of futuristic fiction recedes to an earlier period and can become dated. Poul Anderson's "Flight to Forever," about all of the future, was published in 1950 in the Golden Age of pulp sf, a period that we look back to with nostalgia if we are old enough. I was one year old at the time. (A novel called 1984 was published in 1949, the year of my birth. "Flight to Forever" was collected in Past Times, published in 1984. I think that the paradoxical term "past futures" becomes relevant here.)

In 50,000 AD, the massive stone fortress of Brontothor, with its "...donjon..." (p. 252), exists in an Ice Age caused not by geology but by "...a weapon...which consumed atmospheric carbon dioxide." (p. 256)

Past and future blend together. The time travelers and their hosts confer in a room which:

"...had been made livable, hung with tapestries and carpeted with skins. Fluorotubes cast a white light over it, and a fire crackled cheerfully in the hearth. Had it not been for the wind against the windows, they might have forgotten where they were." (pp. 254-255)

They should be able to forget when they are because this scene could have occurred in many past eras, especially the crackling fire. They are the remnant of an ancient and nearly dead empire - but it is the Galactic Empire and they are surrounded by consequences of interactions with extrasolar species:

there are non-humans among them;

the Ixchulhi had conquered Earth and built the massive pyramid inside which the time projector was trapped for twenty thousand years;

Brontothor was built seven thousand years previously by the Grimanni "...and blasted out of action a millennium later..." (p. 257);

the last, half million year old, member of "...the fantastically old and evolved race of the planet called Vro-Hi..." (p. 242) survives in the caverns and tunnels beneath Brontothor;

the hostile Anvardi are approaching the Solar System.

The perennial sf theme of a rising and falling interstellar empire is addressed and this time the Vro-Hian, applying "'...scientific psychodynamics...,'" has "'...proved rigorously that permanence is a self-contradictory concept.'" (p. 262)

Earlier, Saunders had reflected that human works were impermanent:

"...he thought with a sadness of the cities and civilizations he had seen rise and spend their little hour and sink back into the night and chaos of time." (p. 238)

The Vro-Hian confirms that this must always be so. But imagine the ability to travel through that night and chaos!

Introducing "Flight to Forever"

Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 207-288.

In "The Little Monster," (1974) Jerry Parker time travels from 1995 whereas, in "Flight to Forever," (1950) Martin Saunders time travels from 1973.

Saunders is a big man, a pulp hero. Eve Lang is a beautiful woman, a pulp heroine. MacPherson, blinking owlishly behind thick lenses, is a pulp inventor/(mad) scientist. Sam Hull, cheerful and practical, is a pulp hero's companion.

Saunders and Hull enter the time projector:

"Through the single porthole [Saunders] saw Eve waving. He waved back and then, with an angry motion, flung down the main switch.

"The machine shimmered, blurred, and was gone. Eve drew a shuddering breath and turned back to MacPherson." (p. 211)

 

The first two sentences are narrated from Saunders' pov whereas the third is narrated from a pov outside the time projector. The fourth sentence is probably Eve's pov. Either she feels the shuddering breath and turns to MacPherson or he sees her draw a breath and turn toward him.

 

Yet another time journey has begun. Anything can happen. The author is free to imagine any state of the world in 2073 - assuming that the projector does go when it should. If it does not, then even more possibilities open up.

 

After a double space between paragraphs to indicate a change of scene, the narrative returns to Saunder's pov:

 

"Grayness swirled before them, and the drone of the projectors filled the machine with an enormous song." (ibid.)

 

Unlike the Time Traveler and Jack Havig, Saunders and Hull do not see the external world flashing past. Is that "grayness" what the Doctor calls "the Time Vortex"?

To The End And Beyond

Imaginative authors sometimes take us to the end of all things and beyond.

One very long body of work on time and indeed on time travel is Poul Anderson's two-volume Time Patrol series: Time Patrol and The Shield Of Time. However, the Patrol guards only a million years and we are shown mostly our past, not the future. The Danellian civilization and its successors, if any, remain a mystery.

Five much shorter works on different aspects of time are:

The Time Machine by HG Wells;
The Great Divorce by CS Lewis;
"Flight to Forever" by Poul Anderson;
The Quincunx Of Time by James Blish;
"Man In His Time" by Brian Aldiss.

Wells' Time Traveller sees the giant red sun eclipsed above a lifeless Earth in a remote future and flees back to the nineteenth century. Lewis addresses the relationship between time and eternity but derived his image of eternity from a story about travel to the past. However, what I want to quote from Lewis here is his account of the end and a new beginning:

"...the rim of the sunrise that shoots Time dead with golden arrows and puts to flight all phantasmal shapes."
-CS Lewis, The Great Divorce (London, 1982), p. 117.

The Great Divorce may be compared not only to these works of science fiction but also to Plato's Phaedo and John's Gospel.

The protagonist of "Flight to Forever" remains within time but travels around its circle because beyond the end is the beginning. The protagonists of The Quincunx Of Time receive messages from their future but cannot understand messages from too far ahead. Characters in a longer work by Blish, Cities In Flight, Vol IV, The Triumph Of Time, survive the end of our universe long enough to create new universes from their own bodies. "Man In His Time" addresses only a very brief temporal discrepancy and is included in this list because of its originality.

And here are two more remote futures from Poul Anderson:

"'Once we've discovered how to build a holontic time communicator - it'll mean more than the future talking to the past, you know. It'll mean calling across the universe.'
"'And in that way also making the universe one.' She sighed. 'A grand vision. You and I won't live to see it, though.' Mastering forces so mighty would take many human lifetimes. 'Unless we do live on afterward.... No, I can't say what the limits are for us.'"
-Poul Anderson, Starfarers (New York, 1999), 52, p. 494.

Lewis believed in a hereafter. Anderson speculated about one. (See the "holontic" link.)

- and, for the post-Ragnarok future, see here.

"'Yes,' answered Njord, god of the sea, 'from this day to the last, we are brothers.'" (ibid.)

Lewis believed Christianity but also, like Anderson, valued Norse myths. Thus, we have rounded up several imagined cosmic endings.

Neuroses

OK. I referred here to a passage in Poul Anderson's "Flight to Forever" but could not at the time summon up the motivation to go upstairs for the reference. Now I have done. The passage, with its brief reference to "neuroses," is in:

Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 207-288 AT CHAPTER FOUR, p. 261.

I have previously quoted this passage in:

Emotion And Intelligence In Four Universes

Non-Human Races

"Man Remakes Himself"?

- and also referred to it in:

Inner Conflict

Both Hanno in The Boat Of A Million Years and Belgotai in "Flight to Forever" are survivors from past ages. Belgotai time travels whereas Hanno does it the hard way.

An Opening Paragraph

Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 207-288.

How does an opening paragraph set the tone for the ensuing narrative? Poul Anderson's "Flight to Forever" could have begun, "It was raining..." Instead, we read:

"That morning it rained..." (p. 207)

What morning? We do not know yet but this phraseology sufficiently alerts us that something important is about to happen. This is not just any morning. The opening paragraph continues:

"...a fine, summery mist blowing over the hills and hiding the gleam of the river and the village beyond." (ibid.)

Not a storm, then. But it might be the quiet before a storm? We begin to be informed about the protagonists' physical surroundings. The paragraph continues:

"Martin Saunders stood in the doorway letting the cool, wet air blow in his face..." (ibid.)

We get the viewpoint character's name and more information about his surroundings. He is in a building overlooking the river and village.

"...and wondered what the weather would be like a hundred years from now." (ibid.)

Why does he wonder that? Not only about future weather but also specifically a hundred years hence? This is our first indication in the text that he is about to time travel. The title at the head of the page is "Flight to Forever." And I have not yet mentioned that, between the title and the opening sentence, we read:

"CHAPTER ONE

"No Return"

So there is "...a fine, summery mist..." but also a sense of impending doom...

Earth Seen From Space

Poul Anderson, "The Chapter Ends" IN Anderson, Starship (New York, 1982), pp. 253-281 AT pp. 256-257.

Jorun sees Earth from space:

"It was blue as it turned before his eyes, a burnished turquoise shield blazoned with the living green and brown of its lands, and the poles were crowned with a glimmering haze of aurora. The belts that streaked its face and blurred the continents were cloud, wind and water and the gray rush of rain, like a benediction from heaven." (pp. 256-257)

Can Jorun see Earth turning? I count four colors: blue/turquoise; green; brown; gray - plus the colors of the aurora. Jorun sees not only the planet but also its weather and other atmospheric phenomena.

"Beyond the planet hung its moon, a scarred golden crescent, and he had wondered how many generations of men had looked up to it, or watched its light like a broken bridge across moving waters." (p. 257)

Has the Moon been compared to a bridge before? After this brief visit by Jorun and his colleagues, mankind will leave the Solar System and the galactic periphery forever. Thus, this is very nearly a last farewell. It reminds us of a similar farewell in Anderson's "Flight to Forever." When the Moon has fallen to Earth and Earth now turns one face to the sun, a time traveler thinks:

"So good-by, Sol... Good-by, and thank you for many million years of warmth and light. Sleep well, old friend."
-Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 207-288 AT p. 284.

"Against the enormous cold of the sky - utter black out to the distant coils of the nebulae, thronging with a million frosty points of diamond-hard blaze that were the stars - Earth had stood as a sign of haven." (p. 257)

We have to remember that Jorun has just flown across thirty thousand light years without a spaceship. Imagine swimming (somehow) across the Atlantic and seeing land. Of course the original home planet of mankind looks like a haven.

"To Jorun, who came from Galactic center and its uncountable host of suns, heaven was bare, this was the outer fringe where the stars thinned away toward hideous immensity." (ibid.)

Of course, apparently empty space is really full of unperceived electromagnetic and gravitational energy. CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy replaces the conventional idea of cold, empty space with the semi-theological concept of "Deep Heaven," full of life-giving energy, whereas the scientific reality is that cosmic radiation is omnipresent but lethal:

Ransom en route to Mars experiences space as filled with a life-giving radiance whereas Haertel on the same journey knows that cosmic radiation is lethal.
-copied from here. 

"He had shivered a little, drawn the envelope of air and warmth closer about him, with a convulsive movement. The silence drummed in his head." (ibid.)

Two more sensations: shivering and silence.

"Then he streaked for the north-pole rendezvous of his group." (ibid.)

We commented on Jorun's self-propelled flight here.

Flight To Forever II

Poul Anderson's "Flight to Forever" (IN Anderson, Alight In The Void, New York, 1993, pp. 161-240), published in 1950, begins and ends in 1973 although its hero, Saunders, time travels around the cosmic cycle between the beginning and end of the story. Twenty two lines of text separate:

"The universe was dead!" (p. 235)

from:

"The universe was re-forming." (p. 236)

Between cosmic death and re-formation, Saunders eats a sandwich.

At his first stop, in 2073, he reflects that "...the gerontology of 1973 made it entirely possible..." that "...he was still alive today..." (p. 166). So his 1973 was more advanced than ours.

"Flight to Forever" would make an excellent film. Imagine this dialogue on a sound track:

"CREATURE FROM OUT OF TIME, LEAVE THIS PLACE AT ONCE OR THE FORCES WE USE WILL DESTROY YOU!
"Can you help me?...Can you send me back through time?
"MAN, THERE IS NO WAY TO TRAVEL FAR BACKWARD IN TIME, IT IS INHERENTLY IMPOSSIBLE. YOU MUST GO ON TO THE VERY END OF THE UNIVERSE, AND BEYOND THE END, BECAUSE THAT WAY LIES -
"He screamed...
"GO ON, MAN, GO ON!..." (p. 232)

And before that, these visuals: a "city" of titanic and changing structures, throbbing and pulsing forces, flashing and roaring energies, wavering and blurring light, hissing and stinging air...

Some of the phenomena that Saunders encounters are familiar adventure fiction material rather than serious futurological speculation. In 50,000 AD:

snow and ice caused by war, not by geology;
a massive, half-ruined stone fortress with one banner still flying;
a young long-haired man in helmet and kilt with a four-armed alien companion

- like a good Doctor Who episode, it would make excellent cinema.

"Flight to Forever"

Poul Anderson's "Flight to Forever" has a fine opening paragraph which I discuss here. The timeline of the story is summarized here: Part I; Part II.

Memorable passages include Saunder's farewell to the sun:

"So, good-by, Sol, he thought. Good-by, and thank you for many million years of warmth and light. Sleep well, old friend."
-Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 207-288 AT Chapter Six, p. 284.

Taury's reminiscence (see here):

"'...I thought I deserved this last farewell to the days when we fought with our own hands, and fared between the stars, when we were a small band of sworn comrades whose dreams outstripped our strength.'" (p. 275)

Saunder's reflection on his experience of future history:

"Man's works were so horribly impermanent; he thought with a sadness of the cites and civilizations he had seen rise and spend their little hour and sink back into the night and chaos of time." (Chapter 3, p. 238)

Time Travel and Poul Anderson

The concept of time travel raises at least three questions. Is it logically possible? Is it physically possible? How is it treated in fiction? I have read (a lot of) time travel fiction and studied philosophy, including logic, but not physics. I discuss the logic of time travel here and here but, in the current article, it is mentioned only to introduce the fiction.

"Travel" just to the future is time dilation or temporal stasis. Genuine time travel necessarily involves at least the possibility of pastwards travel, from the present to the past or from the future back to the present. Thus, Wells’ Time Traveler returns; his Sleeper doesn’t.

Time travelers may:

disappear at one time and appear at another;
experience futurewards or pastwards time dilation;
rotate around a massive gravitational field.

The first case is the easiest and simplest. The third is a contribution from later physical theories. In the second, Wellsian, case, it is almost always assumed that time travelers, while traveling, are undetectable by others. This assumption, despite Wells’ defense of it, is questionable but simplifies story telling. It is part of the "treatment in fiction," not of the "logic." The assumption enables a time traveler to arrive in the future without being expected or to arrive in the past without his journey from the future then becoming visible to others.

A pastwards time traveler’s arrival precedes his departure. Thus, an effect precedes its cause and might either cause or prevent it so the causality paradoxes are circular causality and causality violation. A "paradox" is either an apparent or a logical contradiction. The occurrence of apparent contradictions is unexpected but the occurrence of logical contradictions, or "contradictions in terms," is impossible. An event that occurs, because it has an effect, and does not occur, because it is prevented by its effect, is a logical contradiction – unless it occurs in one timeline and does not occur in another. Alternatively, within a single timeline, an uncaused event might prevent the event that would have caused it. Uncaused events, like causal circles, are counter-intuitive but not contradictory. Causal laws are empirical generalizations, not logical necessities.

Causality Violation

The idea of causality violation developed gradually.


(i) Implicit

The earliest account of travel to the past that I know of, although I have not managed to read it, is "Missing One’s Coach," in which a modern man is mysteriously transported to a historical period. (1) Any account of travel to the past implicitly raises the question whether the time traveler would be able to affect (cause, change or prevent) past events.


(ii) Attempted?

Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, a modern man mysteriously transported to a, different, historical period, tries unsuccessfully to change past society without reflecting that success might have been paradoxical. (2) Perhaps he thought that his social revolution, even if successful in Arthurian Britain, would have been unrecorded and forgotten by the nineteenth century?


(iii) Implied

In The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, the Medical Man suggests that a time traveler observing the Battle of Hastings might attract attention as an anachronism while the narrator comments that time traveling "suggests curious possibilities of anachronism and of utter confusion." (3) (4). Pastwards travel is "anachronism". Causality violation would be perhaps the most extreme form of "utter confusion" but Wells did not elaborate.


(iv) Successful

In Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp, a modern man, transported by lightning to yet another historical period, tries successfully to change the course of history. He prevents the Dark Ages. His success is explained by comparing time to a branching tree but also by comparing world lines to a tough web which it is difficult but not impossible to distort. (5) The second comparison continues the Wellsian conceptualization of time as a fourth dimension.


(v) Accidental

In Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore, a time traveler observing the Battle of Gettysburg attracts attention, thus unintentionally changing the outcome of the battle and the subsequent course of history. (6)


(vi) Prevented

In "Time Patrol" by Poul Anderson, a man from our future travels to post-Roman Britain in order to change the course of history but is apprehended by the Time Patrol, a time traveling organization that prevents other time travelers from either accidentally or deliberately changing the past. Causality violation is explained by de Camp’s second comparison. (7)

In "Delenda Est" by Poul Anderson, two time travelers intervene in a Roman-Carthaginian battle, thus deliberately changing the outcome of the battle and the subsequent course of history. Time Patrollers returning from the Pleistocene to 1960 find that they are in an alternative timeline, study history to locate the moment of divergence and restore their preferred timeline by counter-intervening in the pivotal battle. (8)


In Year of the Ransom, Time Patrollers prevent extra-temporal intervention in a later battle. (9) In "Women and Horses and Power and War," they lure time criminals to a particular period with false intelligence about the historical significance of an ancient battle. (10)

In "Amazement of the World," a random fluctuation in space-time energy changes the outcome of a medieval battle and the subsequent course of history. (11) Correcting the course of the battle does not restore the preferred timeline because the hero of the battle is a "personal causal nexus" whose world-line intersects with so many others that small changes in his career disproportionately affect the outcome of the medieval church-state conflict. (12) His actions prevent the birth either of a powerful Emperor or of a powerful Pope. By eliminating this knight, the Patrol restores the familiar history in which a stalemate between theocracy and autocracy allows the development of freedom and science.
The Time Patrol series presupposes a single discontinuous timeline or a single mutable timeline or multiple successive timelines, although I argue here that there is only a terminological difference between "single mutable" and "multiple successive." "One timeline changes into others" and "many timelines succeed each other" mean the same thing.

A discontinuous timeline entails, counter-intuitively, that some events described in the stories do not occur. Mutable/successive timelines entail that deleted timelines existed in the past of a second temporal axis, not that they never existed, as the characters believe. However: 

we can appreciate fictitious characters’ adventures without sharing their beliefs;
Anderson, more than any other time travel writer, avoids overt contradictions and conceals subtler ones;
his accounts of historical periods and analyses of historical processes make this series, like Jack Finney’s two Time novels, a culminating point of time travel fiction even if its logical basis is, partly, questionable.


(vii) Other

Although Finney’s Time novels are primarily about the experience of being in the past, each also culminates in a dramatic causality violation, although I argue here that these excellent novels are marred by inconsistencies when they address this paradox. (13) I also argue here that other authors’ accounts of causality violation are unacceptably inconsistent and that they contribute nothing to the literary development from Twain and Wells via de Camp and Moore to Anderson and Finney.

Using Modern Knowledge in the Past

The question whether a time traveler can change the past is a corollary of the simpler question: would a time traveler be able to use modern knowledge, techniques or equipment to his advantage while in the past? Any major application of modern knowledge etc in the past would have to change it. Using machine guns in an important ancient battle would, almost certainly, change the outcome of the battle and the subsequent course of history. However, guns might be used in an unimportant and unrecorded battle without any longer term consequences. The Time Patrol might allow or even instigate this for some reason as it does with other anachronistic equipment in "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth." (14) Perhaps the Connecticut Yankee thought that his attempted social changes would be unrecorded and forgotten.

A time traveler arriving in an earlier period carries within himself his modern knowledge and technical skills. However, if his means of time travel do not allow him to transport equipment, then it will be difficult or impossible to duplicate modern equipment in an earlier, especially a pre-industrial, period. Hank Morgan, the Connecticut Yankee, arrives with only the clothes that he wears but, impossibly, produces an endless supply of cables, telephones and machine guns and a printing press. He single-handedly and effortlessly masterminds a mostly clandestine industrial revolution in Arthurian Britain. Twain either did not realize or, more probably, did not care that this was impossible, and even had most of it occur off-stage, whereas his successors have paid more attention to details and practical difficulties.

De Camp’s Martin Padway struggles to innovate, e.g., to persuade Romans to accept Arabic numerals, and still has not synthesized gunpowder by the end of the novel, yet it is he, not Morgan, that accomplishes enough to divert history. Anderson’s "The Man who Came Early" is a direct reply to Lest Darkness Fall because its hero, like Padway, is transported to the past by a flash of lightning but he comments that this "…happens only once in many thousands of times." (15) Further, he not only does not introduce modern techniques but dies because he is unskilled in Viking customs and techniques. Against this, a boy in Anderson’s "The Little Monster" uses modern knowledge, techniques and a knife to survive in the Pliocene. (16)

In "Time Patrol," Stane’s easily transported energy weapon and his future sociological knowledge win him a place at court in fifth century Britain but, in "Delenda Est," a Time Patroller asked to manufacture a temporal vehicle in a pre-industrial period "…didn’t have the tools to make the tools to make what was needed…" (17)

Using Modern Knowledge in the Future

Affecting the future does not raise the same logical problem as affecting, and possibly altering, the past. However, we usually expect future societies to be too powerful or complex for a surviving modern man to influence them. This is the case in "Welcome" and "Time Heals" by Poul Anderson. (18) (19) On the other hand, the Time Traveler fights Morlocks with matches and explains them with Darwinism.
Bob Wilson in "By His Bootstraps" by Robert Heinlein is a literary successor not only of the Time Traveller but also of Morgan and Padway because he not only visits a future paradisal society but also uses modern knowledge and equipment to take control of it. (20) Martin Saunders in "Flight to Forever" by Poul Anderson uses the time travel technique to win a space battle. (21)

Circular Causality

"The Chronic Argonauts" by H. G. Wells introduced but understated the circular causality paradox in a contemporary British setting. (22) The central character moves into an empty and shunned house, then travels through time while remaining within the house. On arriving in the past, he is attacked as an intruder by the previous occupants of the house but defends himself and returns to his present. In the absence of any evidence of an intruder, two brothers are convicted of the murder of their father killed in self-defense by the time traveler. Consequently, the house is empty and shunned. "A Stitch in Time" and "The Chronoclasm" by John Wyndham present uncomplicated accounts of the same paradox, also in contemporary British settings. (23) (24)

"By His Bootstraps," The Door into Summer and "-All You Zombies-" by Robert Heinlein present more complicated accounts of circular causality in future American settings. (25) (26) In "…All You Zombies," a sex-changed time traveller is both of his own parents. In "By His Bootstraps," Bob Wilson returns to 1952 to persuade his younger self to visit the future only to be interrupted by his older self trying to prevent him. The nuisance phone caller who interrupts their three-sided argument and the older man who sent Wilson back to 1952 are both himself.

In Beyond the Barrier by Damon Knight, a couple depart to seek a time traveler stranded in the past a moment after seeing themselves return safely with him. Their child does not accompany them but is not left unattended. (27)


The Technicolor Time Machine by Harry Harrison, The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers and three novels by Poul Anderson (The Corridors of Time, There Will Be Time and The Dancer from Atlantis) place circular causality in historical settings. (28) (29) (30) (31) (32)

A circle, once closed, is complete whereas anything that has been changed once can be changed again. Therefore, circular causality stories do not have sequels whereas Finney wrote a sequel to Time and Again and "Time Patrol" became a series. All the works mentioned so far in this section could be set in a single, continuous timeline. Such a timeline can accommodate causal circles but not causality violations because the latter require either a single, discontinuous timeline or several timelines.

Anderson incorporated circular causality into his causality violation scenario. In "Brave to be a King," "The Only Game in Town," "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" and "Star of the Sea," the Patrol finds that it must intervene in history not to preserve but to cause its own past. (33) (34) (35) Sometimes the Patrol prevents causality violations by closing causal circles. After killing Stane, they retrieve the time vehicle that he had stolen but leave its fuel chest to be buried with him because it was "the singular contents of an ancient British barrow," mentioned in a work of literature, that had alerted the Patrol to unauthorized extra-temporal activity in post-Roman Britain. (36)

In "Ivory and Apes and Peacocks," Time Patroller Manson Everard, seeking time criminals in ancient Tyre, uncovers, by detective work, an account of how the Patrol had apprehended the criminals decades earlier. He then leads the expedition to apprehend them. (37)

I do not know whether other authors learned the circular causality paradox from "The Chronic Argonauts." However, this idea, having appeared in Wells, almost certainly came to Anderson from Heinlein, if not also from others. The idea of time travelers on historical battlefields passed from Wells to Moore and Anderson. Attempted historical causality violation passed from Twain via de Camp to Anderson. Thus, the Time Patrol series incorporates and perfects three strands of time travel fiction, including both causality paradoxes.

(Since writing this article, I have read The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger, a major circular causality novel that is not genre sf (see below) but a novel of relationships with time travel integral to the plot. (38) Any novel can reflect on the passage of time and on the distance traveled from childhood but only time travel fiction can return a character physically to his remembered past. The Time Traveller's Wife is a third culmination of time travel fiction, following Anderson’s Time Patrol and Finney’s Time novels.) 

(Later: I have just caught up with Richard Matheson's Bid Time Return/Somewhere In Time, a romantic novel involving time travel. Matheson has some good moments of circular causality and of what it would be like to be in the past. His means of time travel (see the next section) is identical with Finney's but Matheson's novel is ambiguous as to whether the central character, whose account we read, had imagined his chronokinesis.)

Means of Time Travel

Wells coined the terms "time machine," "time traveler" and "time traveling," later shortened to "time travel." Twain had used the phrase "transposition of epochs." Later authors coined the terms "chrononaut" and "chronokinesis" but Wells’ terminology remains in common use. "The Chronic Argonauts," which became The Time Machine, introduced the idea of a temporal vehicle.

The Time Traveler sits on the Time Machine and Time Patrollers sit on their timecycles but the BBC character Dr Who travels inside the TARDIS and Martin Saunders in "Flight to Forever" by Poul Anderson travels inside his time projector. Simon Morley in Jack Finney’s Time novels, Jack Havig in Poul Anderson’s There Will Be Time and Henry DeTamble in Audrey Niffeneger’s The Time Traveller's Wife do not need vehicles. Henry’s uncontrolled chrono-displacements are genetically based, therefore affect only his body, leaving behind even his clothes. Henry’s daughter, a second generation time traveler, sometimes controls when she travels to.

Despite his unaccountable sensation of "headlong motion," the Time Traveler remains spatially stationary while, effectively, fast forwarding, then rewinding, everything else. There is, therefore, no basis for his claim that the Machine, while "traveling," is undetectable because of its speed. In fact, he began his exposition by arguing that material bodies do not move along the fourth dimension but merely extend in that direction. If they did move along "time," then we would have to ask: what do they move in relation to? and: surely the Time Traveler, by accelerating, would leave everything else behind? - whereas he is instead described as seeing objects around him while traveling and then as finding them waiting for him on arrival. Further, motion along the fourth dimension would take time, therefore this dimension would not be time. In any case, a bullet or propeller is invisible because of its speed but we cannot safely occupy the same space as it.

Wells contradicts himself. In "The New Accelerator," he describes a drug which makes the bodies and minds of its inventor and the narrator function "many thousand times" faster than usual. (39) Even when they stand still, their visual and mental processes accelerate. Thus, they see a glass falling so slowly that it appears to them to be suspended in mid-air. Then, when they walk through Folkestone, too swiftly to be seen by anyone else:

"A purple-faced gentleman was frozen in the midst of a violent struggle to refold his newspaper against the wind…that had no existence so far as our sensations went…To see all that multitude changed to a picture, smitten rigid, as it were, into the semblance of realistic wax, was impossibly wonderful." (40)

Next, the inventor:

"…hopes to find a Retarder…it should enable the patient to spread a few seconds over many hours of ordinary time…" (41)

(The Time Traveler spreads a few minutes of his experience over many millennia of history.)

"…and so to maintain an apathetic inaction, a glacier like absence of alacrity, amidst the most animated or irritating surroundings." (41)

For many millennia, the Time Traveler, by comparison with his surroundings, is inactive, glacierlike, "smitten rigid" into the semblance of wax, and therefore should not be described as "going…fast" and blurred into invisibility. (42) His Machine is a Retarder, not an Accelerator, although, of course, what he notices and describes is not his own inaction but the comparative speed of everything else:

"The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me." (42)

Despite this, the Psychologist, one of the Time Traveler’s dinner guests, discussing the recently departed model time machine, says:

"We cannot see it, nor can we appreciate this machine, any more than we can the spoke of a wheel spinning, or a bullet flying…If it is traveling through time fifty times or a hundred times faster than we are, if it gets through a minute while we get through a second, the impression it creates will of course be only one-fiftieth or one-hundredth of what it would make if it were not traveling in time…" (43)

and, to demonstrate this, he passes his hand through the space in which the model time machine had been.

However, his account is incoherent. First, he says that the machine is traveling through time faster than the dinner guests, then he speaks as if it alone is traveling. Secondly, his "while" cannot mean "during the same period of time as." If the machine "gets through" a minute and the guests "get through" a second, then, at the end of these two processes of "getting through," they are not at the same time. The Psychologist means something like, "a time traveler would get through an objective minute in a subjective second whereas we get through only an objective second in a subjective second" or "a time traveler experiences a second while, during the same period of time as, everyone else experiences a minute." Thus, the time traveler is "Retarded," not "Accelerated."

The Psychologist further argues that this stretching (dilation) of the traveler’s duration causes an attenuation of his substance (although it is the Time Traveler who introduces the term "attenuated" shortly afterwards). (44) The material substance that usually fills a second is supposedly stretched out over a longer period to such an extent that it becomes invisible and even intangible. Such attenuation is not usually regarded as a consequence of relativistic time dilation and, even if it were, it would not be the same thing as the "headlong motion" that the Time Traveler says he experiences. Later writers usually accept the undetectability of time travelers in transit but not Wells’ explanation of it.

The static four-dimensional continuum expounded by the Time Traveler is presented more consistently in The Quincunx of Time by James Blish. Blish’s character, Thor Wald, explains:

"…if time is a linear dimension, just like length, height, and width, then the entity that I see before me as Captain Robin Weinbaum, is only a second-by-second section through a much larger entity, one of whose extensions is invisible to me." (45)

Weinbaum and Wald receive messages from their future and thus gain some knowledge of future events but cannot experience those events any sooner than anyone else. One of these messages links Quincunx to Midsummer Century by Blish. (46) In this second short novel, John Martels’ personality, though not his body, is projected from 1985 to 25,000. Personalities are semi-stable electromagnetic fields. Martels’ field is projected accidentally and received by a preserved brain. He could return to 1985, although he opts not to, so his "time-projection" is genuine time travel. His experience is consistent with the Time Traveler’s theory that it is our "consciousness" or "mental existences," not our bodies, that move along time. Wald adds:

"And the consciousness of Robin Weinbaum is moving along that entity in that invisible direction." (45)

There are problems with this theory. First, it contradicts the Time Traveler’s practice, though not Wald’s. Secondly, the Time Traveler describes "mental existences" not, e. g., as "fields" but as immaterial and dimensionless which suggests that they are undetectable and even non-existent. (47) Thirdly, as before, motion "along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity" would take time so this dimension would not be time. (47) Fourthly, the theory suggests that, before or after the passage through human bodies of their minds, these bodies are mere automata although indistinguishable from conscious organisms.

This radical mind-body dualism leads to solipsism. Each of us has no way of knowing whether other organisms are really conscious. My neighbor’s mind, if he has one, may move along the fourth dimension more slowly or quickly than mine. Thus, it may not be present in his body when I am speaking to him. Indeed, it is unnecessary:

"He is not free in any way to change the shaping of the ultimate creature; all he can do is observe…" (45)

"…the shaping of the ultimate creature…" includes the movements of his own body and even of its vocal organs. I remember Blish suggesting in a conversation at a science fiction convention that minds might move along time at different rates but this is surely an absurd conclusion to arrive at. If the conclusion is valid, then I cannot be sure that Blish’s consciousness was present when it was suggested.

Although I have tried to distinguish the literature from the logic, Wells in particular presents both. His introductory conversation, imitated by C. S. Lewis in "The Dark Tower" (although Lewis argues against time travel and for time viewing) is in the literary-philosophical tradition of Plato’s dialogues. (48) We can only do justice to The Time Machine by simultaneously appreciating it as fiction and arguing with its philosophy.

Returning to Blish, one message from the future comes from a ship that is somehow traveling physically backwards in time, from 8873 to 8704, but the recipients of the message do not know enough about the context to understand this. (49) Blish had hoped to base a time travel novel on the "finite, spinning universe" theory that allows world-lines to curve backwards through space-time. Perhaps the "world-line cruiser" mentioned in The Quincunx of Time was an early intimation of this.

Wells beautifully describes the fast forwarding universe:

"…night followed day like the flapping of a dark wing…the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness…the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch…The landscape was misty and vague…I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapor…I saw huge buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams…I saw great and splendid architecture rising about me, more massive than any buildings of our own time, and yet, as it seemed, built of glimmer and mist." (50)

Anderson partially matches this with his character Jack Havig in There Will Be Time:

" ‘I’m in a shadow world while I time-travel. Lighting varies from zero to gray. If I’m crossing more than one day-and-night period, it flickers. Objects look dim, foggy, flat.’ " (51)

But Havig wills himself backwards or forwards in time without needing a vehicle. He senses resistance, as if swimming against a high tide. Thus, his experience is more like a form of motion than is the Time Traveler’s. However, a four dimensional observer, with sufficiently keen perception, would see not Havig’s three dimensional body moving along the fourth dimension but his elongated, and attenuated, world-line stretching along it. Even if the attenuated world-lines of Havig and his fellow time travelers are undetectable, they must be statically present throughout space-time.

Unlike the Time Traveler or Havig, Martin Saunders sees only featureless greyness through the porthole of his time projector while it fast forwards the rest of the universe.

A Time Patroller on a timecycle experiences an instantaneous jump to a different set of spatio-temporal co-ordinates (although where does the energy for this come from?). The TARDIS is also a space-time vehicle, not just a time machine, but it and its occupants exist for a short period in another realm, the "time vortex," between disappearing from one place and time and appearing at another. Heinlein’s Bob Wilson steps instantaneously through a disk of nothingness called a Time Gate that he projects from the future after stepping through it.

Jack Finney’s Simon Morley enters earlier decades by self-hypnosis while wearing period costume in unchanged locations like old buildings. Finney’s fictitious physicist, Danziger, theorizes that this is possible because, according to Einstein, all times are real and the past still exists. However, Einstein’s space-time is the rigid four-dimensional continuum already mentioned. Its earlier decades are not only years ago in time but also light years away in space, not somehow just around the corner or out of sight. Finney’s Time novels would have had a sounder theoretical basis if Danziger, like Blish’s Adolph Haertel (Wald’s predecessor) had been presented as superseding, not implementing, Einstein’s ideas. Morley’s self-hypnosis gets him into the researched past and back to the remembered present but cannot get him into the unknowable future. However, Finney’s sf is nostalgic, not anticipatory, so the future is of no interest to him.

In Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore, The Door into Summer by Robert Heinlein, "Wildcat" by Poul Anderson, "The Little Monster" by Poul Anderson, "The Face in the Photo" by Jack Finney and "The City That Was The World" by James Blish, a machine sends a character to another time but does not accompany him. (52) (53) (54) In "A Stitch in Time" by John Wyndham, a machine in the present lifts a character from the past, then puts him back.

In "Singularities Make Me Nervous" by Larry Niven and The Avatar by Poul Anderson, space travelers become time travelers by rotating around massive gravitational fields but Niven’s field is a black hole whereas Anderson’s is generated by a large artifact called a T machine, named after its theoretical inventor, F. J. Tipler. (55) (56) In "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation" by Larry Niven, named after a Tipler paper, some disaster always prevents the completion of a T machine because its completion in a single, continuous timeline would lead to the logical contradiction of causality violation. (57) A way to destroy your enemies is to let them steal the secret of T machines, unless a nova kills you first.

Olaf Stapledon’s Last Men and the characters in "The Long Remembering" by Poul Anderson observe past events through the brains and nervous systems of previous generations. (58) (59) The Last Men sometimes influence past minds, for example by inspiring Stapledon to write what he thinks is fiction.
In "Welcome" by Poul Anderson, Barlow moves forward five hundred years in a superenergy state. In "Time Heals" by Poul Anderson, Hart moves forward almost nine hundred years in a low-entropy field. By my original criterion, these cases are not time travel because they are not reversible but Anderson does not need reversible techniques in stories that are only about what it would be like to get into the future.

In The Corridors of Time by Poul Anderson, warring factions called Wardens and Rangers walk or drive along corridors that have been rotated onto the temporal axis. Before entering a corridor, time travelers leaving different periods are separated by temporal intervals. After entering the corridor, they are, theoretically, separated only by spatial distances. Some will be near enough to see each other. Others will pass when moving along the corridor. Therefore, they should encounter and interact with each other and with their later and older selves on their first attempt to use the corridor.

However, such an outcome would complicate the story uncontrollably, especially since the factions are at war. An instant pitched battle inside the corridor would ensure that most individuals did not survive their first attempt to travel along the corridor and therefore never did re-enter it as older versions of themselves. Usually, however, the characters use the corridors without meeting each other. The only explanation given is:

"Duration occurs there too, but on a different plane…" (60)

The twentieth century protagonist, Lockridge, standing in a corridor with a companion, thinks:

"At any moment, someone might enter through some other gate and spy them. (Just what did that mean, here in this time which ran outside of time? He’d think about it later.)" (61)

If he does think about it, he does not do so in the novel. When Lockridge, pursued by Rangers, enters one of the corridors, his pursuers arrive in the corridor not a short distance away from him but a few moments after him. Thus, the order of events in the time "on a different plane" in the corridor follows the order of events in the familiar time outside the corridor. Again, this is convenient for story telling purposes. Lockridge would have been apprehended if his pursuers had arrived simultaneously with him.

If, in Lockridge’s experience, his first journey along a particular corridor starts from the twentieth century and his second journey along the same corridor starts from the fourteenth, which of the journeys will an observer inside the corridor witness first? We must imagine not an observer moving steadily along the corridor from the past towards the future but instead a stationary observer able to perceive the entire length of the corridor simultaneously.

As in the Time Patrol series, Anderson is good at writing his way around potential complications so that the reader is rarely troubled by them. The question in the preceding paragraph occurred to me only when writing about The Corridors of Time. Another potential problem arises when we are told that:

"Emergence cannot be precise, because the human body has a finite width equivalent to a couple of months. That was why we had to hold hands coming through – so we would not be separated by weeks." (60)

The Einsteinian space-time equivalence is not one body width to two months or "thirty-five days per foot" but one hundred and eighty six thousand miles to one second. (62)

Thor Wald, explains:

"Assuming, to keep the figures simple, that Robin lives to be a century old, he would then be roughly a foot thick, two feet wide, five feet five inches in height, and five hundred and eighty-six trillion, five hundred and sixty-nine billion, six hundred million miles in duration." (45)

Thus, Anderson’s corridors that endure for six thousand years would have to extend for six thousand light years in space before they were rotated into time but, in this novel, Anderson avoids mentioning Einsteinian space-time. If space-time equivalence is valid, then the simplest theory is that one of our three space dimensions becomes a corridor’s time dimension. It should be possible to construct a spatial corridor that allows entry to any period of the internal history of one of the corridors. This is another complication that Anderson does not need for the story that he wants to tell so it is not mentioned.

Time Patrol timecycles resemble the Time Machine. Jack Havig’s time traveling resembles the Time Traveller’s. The equation of time with length in The Corridors of Time recalls the discussion at the beginning of The Time Machine. Time travel to historical periods is not Wellsian (such a passage was cut from The Time Machine) but does continue the tradition of Twain and de Camp.

Anderson presents more varied and more imaginative means of time travel than anyone else. In particular, the Time Patrol and There Will Be Time are opposites: instantaneous vehicular space-time travel with causality violation as against lifespan-consuming psychic time travel without causality violation. Some means are mere formulaic premises for short stories but the temporal corridors and Havig’s power are original ideas and major features of the novels in which they appear.

Limits on Time Travel

Limits prevent paradoxes. For example, if time travel is limited to the remote past, then time travelers cannot intervene in recent history. If time travel is possible only in interstellar spaceships, then an individual inventor cannot make a machine that will take him to yesterday and return him to today while remaining in his laboratory. Thus, again, he cannot easily intervene in recent events.

The imprecision of emergence from a time corridor is one such limit. A time traveler who sets out to change or prevent a known event will invariably arrive after the event, if he encounters no mishaps en route. Even traveling pastwards to warn a colleague of an impending danger may be impossible:

"Such as could be sent have doubtless been baffled by the uncertainty factor; they emerged too early or too late." (63)

Time travelers know of some events in their own futures but not others:

"Lockridge was certain to reach Brann…That fact was in the structure of the universe. "However, details were unknown. (Like the aftermath…Did he or did he not get back alive? The margin of error in a gate made it unfeasible to check that in advance.)" (64)

Anderson imagines limits, then invents ways around them. In "Flight to Forever," Saunders travels from 1973 to 2073, then finds that he would need infinite energy to travel back more than about seventy five years but returns to 1973 by moving forwards around the circle of time.

In "Wildcat," it is only possible to travel forwards in hundred year hops and backwards by about 100,000,000 years. Therefore, it seems to be impossible to get information from the near future. However, when Team A, visiting the twenty first century, finds that Earth was sterilized by a nuclear war a year after the twentieth century base date, that Team places this data where it will be found by Team B which visits 100,000,000 A. D. and returns home. Team A joins a Jurassic base a century after its establishment. It is known that life will be re-evolving in 100,000,000 A. D. and hoped that descendants of the Jurassic settlers built spaceships.

In There Will Be Time, a few individuals from different periods can time travel by an act of will. They need no spatial journey or temporal vehicle. There seems to be no limit to their time travel ability. However, there are practical limitations. They can carry only a few pounds, including clothes. They are immobilized if attached to a larger mass (seized by an opponent, handcuffed to a captor or chained to a wall). They cannot breathe while traveling. (The Time Traveler did not encounter this difficulty. Perhaps the Time Machine carried some air along with it.) When ice covers the Earth’s surface for extended periods, unwary time travelers cannot emerge and risk suffocation. When the Earth is covered with water, they can emerge but only to drown. Jack Havig’s group carries miniature oxygen tanks when necessary but not all time travelers are so well equipped or organized.

A time traveler in There Will Be Time soon loses count of days flickering past, especially over centuries or millennia and when storms or buildings conceal the dawns. Casting about to zero in on the target date consumes lifespan. Havig’s "chronolog," small and light enough to be carried through time, detects heavenly bodies even through an overcast and flashes a light at his destination. Another time travel group, planning their return journey from the day of the Crucifixion but lacking a chronolog, erects, in the twenty first century ruins of Jerusalem, a big billboard with the date corrected daily.

The dates of some important events are not known. Anyone seeking the Crucifixion aims for Passover, 33 A. D., whether or not this is accurate, but they first have to travel to Jerusalem by ordinary means which did not include air travel until the twentieth century.

Despite the limits to his power, it would seem to be easy for Havig to change the past. The simplest experiment would be this: the time traveler remains in a room for two minutes; if his older self has not appeared after one minute, he travel pastwards for one minute; if he has appeared, he does not travel pastwards. A simple way to intervene in public events would be if he set out to appear in front of a television news reader on the previous day. However, Havig’s first attempt at causality violation is not a carefully planned experiment but an expedition to prevent his father’s death. He is prevented from setting out first by an accidental injury, then by business responsibilities, then by family commitments.

Eventually, like other time travelers, he stops trying. When a captured enemy escapes, they do not waste their efforts in trying to prevent the escape, which has happened, but attempt an early recapture, which may occur in their immediate future. Therefore, most events are as they are either because no time traveller wants to change them or because, knowing that some accident, possibly a fatal injury, will prevent any attempted change, they do not try. In these cases, there need not be any accident waiting to happen to interfering time travelers. The fact that time travelers do not attempt to change an event sufficiently explains why the event is not changed.

If an event occurs, then we know either that no one has tried to prevent it or that someone has tried and failed, whether or not the someone in question is a time traveler. But it is difficult to imagine what could thwart the "simplest experiment" suggested above, especially if it were attempted simultaneously in different places by a team of hundreds of experimentally minded time travelers. Would they all have heart attacks or be struck by lightning or meteors immediately before starting to travel into the past? Must we choose between a logical contradiction and a statistical impossibility?

(Added on 1 April 2007: Thanks to Colin G. Mackay for pointing out that there is no such thing as a "statistical impossibility." My argument should be re-phrased: Must we choose between a logical contradiction and a statistical improbability?)

I can think of only two explanations: either there are no time travelers (this may be the world that we live in) or there are very few and none of them is inclined to conduct this kind of experiment. In There Will Be Time, the group called the Eyrie is intent on exercising power and will do nothing to risk losing its power. Its members are unscientific and even superstitious. Havig’s rival group is morally responsible, intent only on overthrowing the Eyrie and then on doing something useful with time travel (although I still think that a few experiments would be appropriate).

Although Havig cannot change known events, he can sometimes change their significance. This starts on the day of the Crucifixion. Havig goes there hoping to meet other time travelers. The Eyrie goes there to recruit. Thus, for Havig and the Eyrie, Crucifixion day is merely a convenient rendezvous point. On that day, one of Havig’s fellow recruits is called Boris. Later, having defected from the Eyrie and formed a rival group, Havig will recruit Boris to that group, then send him to Jerusalem to infiltrate the Eyrie. Thus, we later learn, Boris must have recognized Havig on the day of their recruitment to the Eyrie but feigned ignorance. Thus also, Havig cannot prevent the Eyrie from recruiting Boris but can cause it to recruit him in circumstances that favor Havig’s cause, not the Eyrie’s.

The Sachem of the Eyrie cannot prevent the Maurai Federation from dominating international politics for three or four centuries after the nuclear war but does found and guide an American-based nation that he hopes will supplant the Maurai and restore white supremacy. He expects to succeed because he periodically visits the future Eyrie and sees that it prospers. He does not know that Havig’s group will defeat the Eyrie and fake the evidence of its success.

When an Eyrie recruiter prevents a thirteenth century time traveler from trying to rescue the Savior en route to Golgotha, Anderson adds that a Roman soldier would have killed the would-be rescuer a second later. This addition is unnecessary. Eyrie intervention is sufficient to explain why the Passion was not interrupted. This would, of course, involve a causal circle: the Eyrie would be able to recruit on the day of the Crucifixion because, while recruiting there, they ensured that the event occurred as described in the Gospels.

Of course, the crucifixion victim whom the time traveler had tried to rescue might not have been the historical Jesus. The Eyrie recruiter asks:

"How do you know that person really was your Lord?" (65)

I took this question to be philosophical or metaphysical but it may be simply historical. There were a lot of men called Jesus and a lot of crucifixion victims.

What would it be like to visit the past?

Any serious account of travel to the past raises this question. L. Sprague de Camp in Lest Darkness Fall and Tim Powers in The Anubis Gates evoke the experiences of modern men having to survive in earlier periods. The single most sustained answer is given by Jack Finney who perfected nostalgic time travel focused on turn of the century New York. His characters immerse themselves in images and records of an earlier year, then experience that year directly. They walk along streets that they have seen in old photographs.

However, Poul Anderson vividly describes the sights, sounds and smells of many historical periods. When Everard enters the Pasargadae of Cyrus the Great, we hear the street cries. (66) When he enters "Tyre of the purple" in 950 B. C., we see the docks and "the costly colors." (67) When he enters Bactra in 209 B. C.:

"…the scene was eerily half-familiar. He had witnessed its like in a score of different lands, in as many different centuries. Each was unique, but a prehistorically ancient kinship vibrated in them all." (68)

When Everard travels on foot through medieval Sicily, four pages describe the countryside that he walks through. (69) When Havig enters Jerusalem in 33 A. D., Anderson lists the smells of horses, men, smoke, bread, leeks, garlic, grease, animal droppings, musk, roses, lumber and leather. (70) His time travelers move not through abstract time but through real history. Time Patrollers are immersed in ancient civilizations, Roman legions, medieval battlefields and barbarian settlements in European forests. Two Patrollers on a mission to the first century Low Countries camp on a hill surrounded by woods:

"They could have sprung back to Amsterdam’s comforts, but it would have wasted lifespan, not in the shuttling but in the commuting to and from quarters there, the shucking and redonning of barbarian garb, perhaps most the changes back and forth of mind-set. Let them rather dwell in this archaic land, become intimate not only with its people but with its natural world. Nature - the wilderness, the mysteries of day and night, summer and winter, storm, stars, growth, death – pervaded it and the souls of the folk. You could not really understand them, feel with them, until you had yourself entered into the forest and let it enter into you." (71)

A Patrol ethnographer who has lived for twelve years in the first century remarks, when visiting his colleagues’ camp:

"Coffee…I often drink it in my dreams." (72)

A Patroller staying with an Italian knight in 1146 A. D., must eat "…the usual meager, coffeeless breakfast." (73)

In some passages, Anderson follows the experiences not of the Patrollers but of their acquaintances in the past and thus writes pure historical fiction. When a Time Patroller, mistaken for Wodan, has a son in the fourth century:

"Dagobert stayed unrestful…folk said that was the blood of his father in him, and that he heard the wind at the edge of the world forever calling. When he came back from his trip south, he brought news that a Roman lord hight Constantine had finally put down his rivals and become master of the whole Empire." (74)

Chapters recounting only the experiences of permanent dwellers in the past often begin with the weather: "Winter brought rain…" (75); "Wind rushed bitter…" (76); "Suddenly springtime billowed over the land." (77)

The concluding two sections of "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth," and the opening three sections of the following story, "Star of the Sea", cover:

time travelers in 43 A. D.	science fiction
the death of a king in 374 A. D.	historical fiction
a divine betrothal	mythological writing
the siege of a first century Roman camp	historical fiction
a time traveler in 1986 A. D.	science fiction

One Time Patroller, in 1990, specifically rejects Finney’s nostalgic approach to time travel:
"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." (78)

Anderson writes poetically not only about past times but also about variable reality. Everard in Amsterdam in 1986 knows that "…all the life that pulsed in the city…" is:

"…a spectral flickering, diffraction rings across abstract, unstable space-time, a manifold brightness that at any instant could not only cease to be but cease ever having been." (79)

(Only the last clause is problematic. Causality violation in an earlier century might prevent Amsterdam from coming into existence but how could causality violation allow the city to exist until 1986, then annihilate it? Nothing can exist until a particular time, then, at that time, cease having existed until that time. The deletion of a four-dimensional space-time continuum might be an observable event in a fifth dimension functioning as a second temporal dimension but it cannot be an event within that same continuum. Analogously, if a book is thrown into a furnace, then it does not make sense to ask at what point in the text the entire text is destroyed. It is all destroyed together.)

What would it be like for a modern man to be transported to the remote future?

The classic answer remains The Time Machine. Wells describes his future as colorfully as Anderson and Finney describe their pasts. The modern man need not be transported by time travel specifically. Three successors to The Time Machine are "Flight to Forever" by Poul Anderson (time travel), A World Out Of Time by Larry Niven (time dilation) and Midsummer Century by James Blish ("time-projection"). (80) All four works not only describe a future period but also summarize a future history.

The Time Traveler fast forwards the growth of civilization, deduces the devolution into Morlocks and Eloi and witnesses the extinction of life before returning to the nineteenth century. Martin Saunders in "Flight to Forever" stops often enough to learn the course of galactic history before passing through heat death and re-creation into the twentieth century of the next identical cosmic cycle. In A World Out Of Time, Jerome Corbell’s identity survives for three million years by freezing, memory transfer, time dilation, cold sleep and rejuvenation. He reconstructs most of what has occurred in the Solar System in his absence. In Midsummer Century, when Martels’ consciousness has been projected from 1985 to 25,000, he learns of four successive future civilizations and helps to build a fifth.

Literature and Genre

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is an American fantasy about a modern entrepreneur mysteriously transported to a historical period. The Time Machine is a British science fiction novel about a modern scientist technologically traveling to a remote future. They were the first major works on time travel. Like the first science fiction novel, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, they predate the literary ghetto of genre science fiction and are generally recognized as contributions to world literature. (81)

In passing from Twain and Wells to de Camp and Heinlein, we pass not only from the original ideas to their fuller development but also from literature to genre. The genre includes:

action-adventure fiction with extraterrestrial, futuristic or other exotic settings;
conceptual speculation, for example about the technology and paradoxes of time travel;
serious fiction, for example about the predicaments of travelers to the past or future, the literary successors of the Yankee and the Time Traveler.

To illustrate this third point:

"It was a strange thing to meet her at intervals of months which for Havig were hours or days. Each time, she was so dizzyingly grown. In awe he felt a sense of that measureless river which he could swim but on which she could only be carried from darkness to darkness." (82)

In that paragraph, Anderson expresses universal experience, "…carried from darkness to darkness", and Wellsian imagination, "…that measureless river which he could swim…"


The Time Machine, originally described as a "fantastic and imaginative romance," combines conceptual speculation with serious fiction while incorporating action-adventure in the fights with the Morlocks and the encounter with giant crabs. Much genre sf emphasizes action-adventure and/or speculation at the expense of characterization and even of competent writing but other genre writers are worthy successors of Shelley, Twain and Wells.

In particular, Anderson’s sf ranges from effective action-adventure fiction to serious thematic and speculative novels, sometimes featuring the same characters. Dominic Flandry stars in mere space operas with the colorful setting of the Terran Empire, then in more substantial novels about imperial decline. Another reader described Anderson to me as a popular writer with literary pretensions. I think that it is the other way around. Anderson was a serious writer who enjoyed action-adventure so much that he sometimes introduced it into stories that would have been better without it. Thus, The Boat of a Million Years has an unnecessary few pages when the small group of immortals practices a deception in order to rescue one of its members from a hospital. (83) This could have happened off stage, if it even had to happen.

By contrast, the Time Patrol police actions and battle scenes, when they do occur, are integral to the narrative and secondary to the descriptions of past eras and the predicaments of the characters. The Time Patrol places technological time travel in historical settings, thus synthesizing the legacies of The Time Machine and A Connecticut Yankee. Uniquely, the Time Patrol is not a single story or novel about an individual time traveler experiencing one of the causality paradoxes in a particular historical period but a series of stories and novels about an organization of time travelers experiencing both causality paradoxes in many historical periods. Because it is a long sf series set in many historical periods, the Time Patrol is a more effective synthesis of sf with historical fiction than is Asimov’s celebrated Foundation series which merely projects the Roman Empire onto the Galaxy.

By contrast, Anderson:

projects the Roman Empire less implausibly onto a smaller volume of interstellar space and a shorter period of time in one of his eight future histories;
speculates more credibly about interstellar travel in later future histories;
shows the real Roman Empire in The Golden Slave (historical fiction), The King Of Ys tetralogy (historical fantasy, with Karen Anderson) and the Time Patrol series (historical sf); (84) (85)
depicts the Viking period in a historical trilogy and in several fantasies, including a retold Saga; (86) (87)
depicts the fourteenth century in historical fiction, historical fantasy and sf; (88) (89) (90)
also synthesizes sf with historical fiction in a long novel about an immortal man who lives from before Christ into an indefinite future, thus experiences but cannot revisit historical periods (his single volume could have been two, a fictitious history with a futuristic sequel); (91)
depicts alternative histories in the Time Patrol series and in several short stories and fantasy novels; (92) (93) (95) (95)
imagines an inn between the worlds where characters from different periods, histories and fictions meet, although the Time Patrol excludes itself even from this multiverse by disallowing the peaceful coexistence of alternative timelines. (96)

Jules Verne’s fiction is collectively called "Extraordinary Voyages." Anderson’s could be called "Past and Future Histories."

Heinlein linked his ingenious time travel fiction to his Future History when a major character of the History, Lazarus Long, revisited the period of his own childhood in the early twentieth century. (97) Unfortunately, Heinlein wasted this excellent premise by focusing on a sentimentalized sexual relationship with the added shock value of incest: Long with his, at that time unknowing, mother. Asimov linked his logically inconsistent causality violation novel, The End of Eternity, to his Galactic Empire series when the prevention of time travel allowed the development of the Empire. See here. (98) Anderson linked his ingenious circular causality novel, There Will Be Time, to his Maurai future history when his time traveler, Jack Havig, visited the Maurai period.

In the Time Patrol series, we read of the Temporal language which enables Patrollers from different periods to communicate without being understood by others and which has tenses for time travel. In There Will Be Time, time travel is discussed, briefly, in Latin: "Es tu peregrinator temporis?" (65)
What Anderson presents is both more and better. His Time Patrol, originally four stories, collected and re-arranged to present a beginning, a middle and a culmination, was already a major contribution to time travel fiction. Then, over a decade later, further stories, usually longer and more complicated and making original contributions to the time travel concept, began to be added so that the series is now several times its original length with possibilities for further growth although, sadly, Anderson is no longer alive to continue it. It is unique in time travel fiction and superior among sf series. Whereas other writers develop particular aspects of the time travel concept – historical veracity, futuristic speculation, the technology or one of the paradoxes – Anderson alone addresses every aspect.

End-notes

1. Anonymous, "Missing One’s Coach" (Dublin: Dublin Literary Magazine, 1838).
2. Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 1889.
3. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (London: Pan Books, 1973), p. 11.
4. Wells, The Time Machine, p. 17.
5. L. Sprague de Camp, Lest Darkness Fall (Henry Holt & co, 1941) reprinted as Lest Darkness Fall (New York: Pyramid Books, 1963), pp. 5-6.
6. Ward Moore, Bring the Jubilee (London: Four Square Books, The New English Library, 1965).
7. Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1955), reprinted in P. Anderson, Guardians of Time (London: Gollancz, 1961), (London: Pan Books, 1964) and P. Anderson, The Time Patrol (New York: TOR Books, October 1991), pp. 1-33).
8. Poul Anderson, "Delenda Est" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1955), reprinted in Anderson, Guardians of Time and The Time Patrol, pp. 105-139.
9. Poul Anderson, "Year of the Ransom" (Byron Press Visual Publications, 1988), reprinted in Anderson, The Time Patrol, pp. 399-458.
10. Poul Anderson, "Women and Horses and Power and War" in The Shield of Time (New York: TOR Books, 1990), pp.7-123.
11. Anderson, "Amazement of the World" in The Shield of Time, pp. 267-436.
12. Anderson, "Amazement of the World," p. 408.
13. Jack Finney, Time and Again (New York: Simon & Schuster Inc, 1970) and From Time to Time (New York: Simon & Schuster Inc, 1995).
14. Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" in P. Anderson, Time Patrolman (New York, TOR Books, 1983), pp. 117-254, reprinted in The Time Patrol, pp. 207-289.
15. Poul Anderson, "The Man Who Came Early" (Fantasy House Inc, 1956), reprinted in D. Knight, ed., 100 Years of Science Fiction (London: Pan Books, 1972), pp. 185-212.
16. Poul Anderson, "The Little Monster" (Roger Elwood, ed., Way Out, 1974), reprinted in P. Anderson, Past Times (New York: TOR Books, 1984), pp. 142-163.
17. Anderson, "Delenda Est," p. 118.
18. Poul Anderson, "Welcome" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1958), reprinted in P. Anderson, Past Times, pp. 58-70.
19. Poul Anderson, "Time Heals" (Astounding Science Fiction, October 1949), reprinted in P. Anderson, Dialogue with Darkness (New York: TOR Books, February 1985), pp. 165-191.
20. Robert Heinlein, "By His Bootstraps" (Astounding Science Fiction, October 1941, by Anson MacDonald), reprinted in R. Heinlein, The Menace From Earth (Gnome Press, 1959) and (London: Corgi Books, 1983), pp. 40-87.
21. Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever," (Super Science Stories, 1950), reprinted in P. Anderson, Past Times, pp. 207-288.
22. H. G. Wells, "the Chronic Argonauts" (The Science Schools Journal, 1888).
23. John Wyndham, "A Stitch in Time" in Consider Her Ways (London: Penguin Books, 1961).
24. John Wyndham, "The Chronoclasm" (Science Fantasy, No. 10, 1954), reprinted in J. Wyndham, The Seeds of Time (London: Penguin Books, 1959), pp. 9-31.
25. Robert Heinlein, The Door into Summer ( The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October, November and December 1956) reprinted as The Door into Summer (London: Pan Books, 1974).
26. Robert Heinlein, "-All You Zombies-" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1959), reprinted in The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag (Gnome Press, 1959) and (London: New English Library, November, 1980), pp. 7-111.
27. Damon Knight, Beyond the Barrier (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1964).
28. Harry Harrison, The Technicolor Time Machine (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1968).
29. Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates (London: Triad Grafton, 1986).
30. Poul Anderson, The Corridors of Time (Amazing Stories, May, June 1965), reprinted and expanded as The Corridors of Time (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1966) and (London: Panther Books, 1968).
31. Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York: Signet, 1973).
32. Poul Anderson, The Dancer from Atlantis (London: Sphere Books Ltd, 1977).
33. Poul Anderson, "Brave To Be A King" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1955), reprinted in Anderson, Guardians of Time and The Time Patrol, pp. 34-68.
34. Poul Anderson, "The Only Game in Town" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1960), reprinted in Anderson, Guardians of Time and The Time Patrol, pp. 79-104.
35. Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" in The Time Patrol, pp. 291-398.
36. Anderson, "Time Patrol", p. 11.
37. Anderson, "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks" in Time Patrolman and The Time Patrol, pp. 141-205.
38. Audrey Niffeneger, The Time Traveler’s Wife (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004; London: Vintage, 2005).
39. H. G. Wells, "The New Accelerator" (The Strand, December 1901) reprinted in The Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells (London: A & C Black, 1987), p. 932.
40. Wells, Complete Short Stories, p. 937.
41. Wells, Complete Short Stories, p. 941.
42. Wells, The Time Machine, p. 24.
43. Wells, The Time Machine, p. 16.
44. Wells, The Time Machine, p. 26.
45. James Blish, The Quincunx of Time (New York: Dell, October 1973), pp. 115-116.
46. James Blish, Midsummer Century (The Magazine Of Fantasy and Science, April 1972) and (New York: Doubleday, 1972).
47. Wells, The Time Machine, p.10.
48. C. S. Lewis, "The Dark Tower" in The Dark Tower and other stories, (London: Fount Paperbacks, 1983), pp. 15-91.
49. Blish, The Quincunx of Time, p. 96.
50. Wells, The Time Machine, pp. 24-25.
51. Anderson, There Will Be Time, p. 37.
52. Poul Anderson, "Wildcat" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1958), reprinted in P. Anderson, Past Times (New York: TOR Books, 1984), pp. 7-57.
53. Jack Finney, "The Face in the Photo" in I Love Galesburg in the Springtime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962) and About Time (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), pp. 130-147.
54. James Blish, "The City That Was The World" (Galaxy Magazine, July 1969), pp. 69-97.
55. Larry Niven, "Singularities Make Me Nervous" in L. Niven, Convergent Series (New York: Ballantine Books, March 1979)
56. Poul Anderson, The Avatar (London: Sphere Books, 1985).
57. Larry Niven, "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation" in Niven, Convergent Series, pp. 183-187.
58. Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (London: Penguin Books, October 1930), reprinted June 1937.
59. Poul Anderson, "The Long Remembering" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1957), reprinted in P. Anderson, Homeward and Beyond (New York: Berkley Publishing Corporation, July 1976), pp. 22-36.
60. Anderson, The Corridors of Time, p.
61. Anderson, The Corridors of Time, p. 88.
62. Anderson, The Corridors of Time, p. 35.
63. Anderson, The Corridors of Time, p. 151.
64. Anderson, The Corridors of Time, p. 132.
65. Anderson, There Will Be Time, p. 62.
66. Anderson, "Brave To Be A King," p. 42.
67. Anderson, "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks," pp. 143-145.
68. Anderson, "Women and Horses and Power and War," p. 24.
69. Anderson, " Amazement of the World," pp. 318-322.
70. Anderson, There Will Be Time, p. 61.
71. Anderson, "Star of the Sea," pp. 336-337.
72. Anderson, "Star of the Sea," p. 351.
73. Anderson, "Amazement of the World," p. 419.
74. Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth," p. 239.
75. Anderson, "Star of the Sea," p. 309.
76. Anderson, "Star of the Sea," p. 323.
77. Anderson, "Star of the Sea," p. 331.
78. Anderson, "Beringia" in The Shield of Time, p. 178.
79. Anderson, "Star of the Sea," p. 301.
80. Larry Niven, A World out of Time (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976).
81. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (New York: Airmont Books, 1963).
82. Anderson, There Will Be Time, p. 98.
83. Poul Anderson, The Boat of a Million Years (London: Orbit Books, 1991), pp. 439-445.
84. Poul Anderson, The Golden Slave (New York: Kensington Publishing Corp., 1960, 1980).
85. Poul and Karen Anderson, The King of Ys (London: Grafton Books, Volume 1, 1988; Vol 2, 1988; Vol 3, 1989; Vol 4, 1989).
86. Poul Anderson, The Last Viking Trilogy (New York: Kensington Publishing Corp., 1980).
87. Poul Anderson, Rogue Sword (New York: Kensington Publishing Corp., 1960).
88. Poul Anderson, Hrolf Kraki’s Saga (New York: Ballantine Books, 1973).
89. Poul Anderson, The Merman’s Children (London: Sphere Books, 1981).
90. Poul Anderson, The High Crusade (New York: MacFadden Books, June 1964; September 1968).
91. Anderson, The Boat of a Million Years.
92. Poul Anderson, "The House of Sorrows" in P. Anderson, All One Universe (New York: TOR Books, My 1997), pp. 69-98.
93. Poul Anderson, "Eutopia" in Past Times, pp. 112-141.
94. Poul Anderson, Three Hearts and Three Lions (London: Sphere Books, 1973, 1977).
95. Poul Anderson, A Midsummer Tempest (London: Futura Publications Ltd, 1975).
96. Poul Anderson, "Losers' Night" in All One Universe, pp. 105-123.
97. Robert Heinlein, Time Enough For Love (New York: G. P. Putman’s Sons, 1973), pp. 450-589.
98. Isaac Asimov, The End Of Eternity (New York: Doubleday, 1955) and (London: Panther Books, January 1959; April 1964; November 1965).

Email address: paulshackley@gmail.com