Convergent Time Travel Narratives

Poul Anderson's time travel fiction comes together at a conceptual level. 

Jack Havig:

"'The pattern is. Our occasional attempts to break it, and our failures, are part of it.'"

-There Will Be Time, X, 114.

 

A Danellian:

 

"'Reality is. You are among those who guard it.'"

-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1990), PART SIX, 1990 A. D.

 

Of course, an immutable pattern is and a mutable reality is in different senses of "is" but, nevertheless, both are.

 

"Wildcat," like "Time Patrol" and There Will Be Time, links time travel to faster-than-light travel. In "Wildcat," a chaplain describes the idea of a fixed, rigid timeline as a heresy. When Herries retorts that the idea has been proved and is the theoretical basis of the time projector, the chaplain replies that time may be fixed from God's viewpoint but that mortal men have free will which is one of the links in the causal chain so that fatalism is unwarranted.

 

The argument in "Wildcat" and There Will Be Time that past moments are unalterable flatly contradicts "Time Patrol" but this is an example of Anderson addressing an issue from every angle. Other examples are:

Is AI feasible?

Is FTL possible?

Are life and intelligence common in the universe?

Two Collections

Poul Anderson wrote many short stories. Many of them have been collected. As its American title suggests, Seven Conquests (New York, 1984)/Conquests (London, 1981) collects seven short stories. Alight In The Void (New York, 1993) contains six works but the sixth is a poem. Thus, these two volumes contain twelve stories.

Four of them need not be in these volumes:

"Wildcat" in Conquests and "Flight to Forever" in Alight In The Void are time travel stories and as such are included in Past Times, a (mainly) time travel collection;

"Cold Victory" in Conquests is an installment of Anderson's first future history series and as such is collected in, indeed is the title story of, one volume of that history;

"Son of the Sword" in Alight In The Void is historical fiction, therefore, I argue, should be included with at least four other stories set in diverse past periods in a relevant collection that could be called Many Times.

Conquests is a collection on the theme of war. Thus, since, e.g., "Wildcat" is about both war and time travel, there is some rationale for its appearing in two differently themed collections. However, what is needed now is a complete multi-volume collection, without duplication, of all of Poul Anderson's short stories. Seven Conquests/Conquests can either lose the Seven from its title or, probably, gain two relevant stories from among those that are still uncollected.

I have recently discussed the five stories in Alight In The Void. "Wildcat" is discussed briefly under "Limits on Time Travel" in the earlier post, "Time Travel And Poul Anderson," dated Tuesday, 24 April, 2012 (see here), but will warrant further discussion later (indeed has already been discussed (see here and here) because the order of these posts has been shuffled between drafting and publishing).

Limits On Time Travel

"Wildcat."

One way to avoid time travel paradoxes is to put limits on time travel, e.g., if it is possible to travel only into the geological past, then it is impossible to change human history. But an ingenious author can find ways around his own limits.

For the limits in "Wildcat," see Answers.

In order to project a material body any distance into the past, it is necessary to energize it;

however, it must be energized so much that the minimal period for which it can be projected is just over one hundred million years;

on the other hand, inertial resistance is much lower when projecting futureward so that, in that case, hundred-year jumps become possible.

It seems to follow that someone from the twentieth century can visit the twenty first but not report back?

No. Make enough century-long jumps forward, then one long jump backward. Herries was right when, earlier in the story, he guessed that there would after all be some roundabout, energy-consuming route into the historical past. He thought that, by exploiting such a route, US Intelligence would test the theory of an immutable timeline by trying to prevent the Russian Revolution. Maybe they did try that but something else is going on. How will it be possible to receive a report from a century hence?

Winding Up On "Wildcat," Maybe

"Wildcat."

Four Miscellaneous Points

 

(i) "Hell take it, thought Herries, we may be damned but why must we be fools into the bargain?

"Somewhere a brontosaur hooted, witlessly plowing through a night swamp.

"Well, I'd better - No!" (p. 46)

 

We recognize two Andersonianisms here. First, the witless brontosaur parallels the foolish human beings. This time, we are reflected in a swamp-dwelling animal rather than in a hooting wind. Secondly, Herries has a moment of realization. His "No!" is really a "Yes," as he suddenly realizes what he can do next.

 

(ii) There is an epic battle between a tyrannosaur and men in jeeps with guns and grenades. Sometimes I summarize such scenes here. Instead, I merely commend this one to other readers.

(iii) Senator Wien who works quietly behind the scenes to ensure that mankind survives in the Jurassic Period reminds us, or at least me, of Senator Bliss Wagonner in James Blish's They Shall Have Stars who works quietly behind the scenes to ensure that mankind escapes from the Solar System. Both are Cold War scenarios. Wien knows of an imminent nuclear war. Wagonner anticipates an encroaching Bureaucratic State.

 

(iv) We learn why the sky is hidden in the opening sentence. There are permanent layers of fog and frequent rain clouds. Subsequent generations will know of but never see sun, moon and stars.

Cold War Speculation

"Wildcat."

While the twentieth-century Cold War nuclear stand-off lasted, its outcome was a subject of speculative fiction and, as such, was discussed by time travelers in Poul Anderson's "Wildcat" (1958):

"'Same old standoff.'

"'I wonder how long it can last?' murmured Polansky.

"'Not much longer,' said Olson. 'Read your history.'" (p. 16)

 

Wrong. History said nothing about Mutually Assured Destruction. What happened was that deterrence prevented World War III but the arms race bankrupted the USSR.

 

What would have happened if, instead of stockpiling nuclear weapons, the USSR had used those same resources for positive, peaceful purposes?

Time Travel And Survival

 

If you have time travel and your future is about to become uninhabitable, then you can survive by traveling far enough into the past, as in Poul Anderson's "Wildcat" and also in a Star Trek episode, whereas, if there is time travel in a mutable timeline, then maybe you need a temporal police force, as in Anderson's Time Patrol series: two examples of time travel as a means to survival, the first covered by Anderson in a single short story, the second in a long series of stories and novels, and, since this a late night post, we will leave it there till the morning when I expect to finish rereading and posting about "Wildcat" - tempus fugit.

Wildcat

I have discussed some aspects of Poul Anderson's "Wildcat," IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 7-57, previously but not recently.

Scientific knowledge includes knowledge of dinosaurs. Therefore, science fiction includes imaginative accounts of encounters with dinosaurs that are to be found in the most ingenious of locations:

a lost World;
a Land that Time Forgot;
the center of the Earth;
a Dinosaur Island;
an African valley;
other planets;
a Jurassic Park;
the Jurassic Period.

Explorers in jungles, in the Pacific, within the Earth, on other planets and in time encounter dinosaurs. Once, according to the Brigadier in Doctor Who:

"Large prehistoric reptiles began to appear in the center of London. Needless to say, there was a certain amount of panic and some loss of life. The criminal element took advantage of the situation. We have contained the criminals and the reptiles within a five mile radius of the center."

(Or words to that effect.)

Anderson's wildcatters encounter brontosaurs, tyrannosaurs, plesiosaurs and pterodactyls because they travel to the Jurassic Period just as his Time Patrolmen meet Sherlock Holmes because they travel to the Victorian period. However, the dinosaurs, although dangerous, are essentially just part of the Jurassic scenery. What mainly happens is that the wildcatters interact economically and politically with the Cold War period of the twentieth century:

"...there would not be such a shortage of oil up in the future if Transoco had not gone back and drained it in the past. A self-causing future -" (pp. 16-17)

"Hoyle's idea seemed to be right, [oil] had not been formed by rotting dinosaurs but was present from the beginning. It was the stuff which had stuck the planets together." (p. 17)

Fred Hoyle? I thought that oil was formed by rotting vegetation?

Answers

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

they are drilling for oil in the Jurassic;

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

Three Time Travel Stories

"Wildcat," "The Nest" and "The Little Monster" are three science fiction stories about time travel to the far past by Poul Anderson so you might think that they would be similar stories and you would be wrong.

Some time travelers are projected into the past for a finite period whereas others are sent for an indefinite period and still others travel freely in a conventional "time machine." (We owe this archaic terminology to HG Wells although we no longer call aircraft "flying machines" or computers "thinking machines.")

In "Wildcat," a group of time travelers from the story's "present" interacts with the ancient environment;

in "The Little Monster," a single time traveler from the near future interacts with pre-men;

in "The Nest," a group of time travelers from different periods interact with each other.

In "The Nest," which I will reread next, we must persevere for several pages before we learn how these characters from different periods have come together. Could they be time criminals in the history guarded by the Time Patrol but not yet apprehended by the Patrol? Maybe not, because they have stolen a temporal vehicle from incautious futurians whereas, in its timeline, the Patrol polices all temporal excursions and would have prevented such incautious behavior.

Meanwhile, I am translating Virgil, eating lunch and going for a walk so further dispatches from the distant past will be delayed.

Deals With Dinosaurs

I should have said last night that Poul Anderson has a dinosaur story, "Wildcat," although not a surviving dinosaurs story. There is also "Iggy" in "The Nest."

Sf characters can encounter dinosaurs:

by time traveling;

by cloning them;

on other planets;

on a lost plateau, island or continent;

in a lost valley;

inside the Earth;

on a parallel Earth.

Have I missed any? Anderson goes for the time travel option as does Asimov although only to make a point about something else. A drunk and/or time traveler claims that the small dinosaurs with guns killed the big ones, then each other. (This is not about dinosaurs but about us.) A time criminal in Anderson's Time Patrol series might try to prevent the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Relevant authors:

Anderson

Asimov

Bear

Blish

Bradbury

Burroughs

Crichton

de Camp

Doyle

Stirling

Collections II

In a recent post, I listed fourteen non-series Poul Anderson collections found on a shelf at home. Needless to say, a few more have since come to light:

Fantasy, but that is a bit different because it is mainly fantasy, not sf;

Winners, but that does have a point - five Hugo winners (two of them also belong in different future history collections);

an Ace Double of The Makeshift Rocket and Un-Man and other novellas.

the Un-Man collection contains:

"Un-Man," which belongs in the Psychotechnic future history;

"Margin of Profit," which belongs in the Technic History;

"The Live Coward," which is in at least one of the fourteen collections already mentioned.

Thus, Un-Man and other novellas has no right to exist as a separate collection!

Another complication is that Conquests, already mentioned, was originally published as Seven Conquests. These are not two collections with similar titles but one collection with different titles. There is a great need for Poul Anderson's short story collections to be uniformly rationalized.

Later: Sorry, Conquests was not already mentioned. Conflict was. You see how confusing it gets. I would have listed those two titles beside each other. They both contain "Kings Who Die" and "Details." Each also has one that belongs in a future history collection. Conquests also contains "Wildcat" that is, rightly, in the time travel collection, Past Times. Thus, Conquest's seven stories could be reduced to three - and I am sure that, of those, "Inside Straight" is in one or even two of the fourteen listed collections.

Still Later: And The Makeshift Rocket is "A Bicycle Built For Brew" which is in one or two of the collections so that entire Ace Double is redundant.

The Freedom Of The Will

"'...we have free will. The fixed-time concept need not, logically, produce fatalism...man's will is itself one of the links in the causal chain.'"
- Poul Anderson, "Wildcat" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 7-57 AT p. 32.

I agree so far although, since the speaker is a chaplain, he and I would probably disagree if we discussed free will further.

Determinism is the belief that every event is caused. Fatalism is the belief that every human effort is futile. (Futilism?) I can only know whether my efforts are futile by making an effort and making an effort makes a difference. It may be that some people are caused to make an effort and that others are not but those who do make an effort do make a difference. Otherwise, we would not have a civilization.

Determinism and "...fixed-time..." are not necessarily identical. We explain an event in three ways. It is:

(i) caused, an effect of an earlier event;
(ii) uncaused or random;
(iii) a free act.

However, I suggest that "free" means "unconstrained" but not "uncaused." And, if a free act were uncaused, then it could be classified as random. Thus, (i) and (ii) are sufficient to explain all events, including free acts.

Continuing Conquests

Continuing to reread Poul Anderson's Conquests/Seven Conquests, I have completed three of the seven stories. What did I forget to say about the second story, "Wildcat"?

First, it has a good fight scene between men with guns in jeeps and a tyrannosaur. Secondly, I have formed the habit of noting words in Anderson's extensive vocabulary that I am unfamiliar with. When the viewpoint character relieves a guard, the latter hands over his rifle and adds, "'And here's the glim...'" (Seven Conquests, New York, 1984, p. 75). From the context, I infer that he means his flashlight. Of course, in a visual medium, we would see what he was handing over.

The doctor says of a patient, "'He can do light work with that Stader on his arm.'" (p. 61) Stader?

And why does the chaplain call the oil rig men "'...wildcatters...,'" the phrase that becomes the title of the story? (p. 63)

Back to the third story, "Cold Victory." The Captain demonstrates that the anti-Humanist counterrevolution succeeded because of chance events, accidents, but the academic insists that Humanism is a historical movement that will not be deflected so easily so their philosophical disagreement remains unresolved.

"Cold Victory" addresses the harrowing issue of brothers on opposite sides in a civil war. In this case, the one who wins dies. The story also cameos a character whose condition is addressed in another installment of the Psychotechnic future history, a tramp who draws his citizen's allowance and preserves old stories: one of the millions permanently unemployed because of advanced technology.

Although this tramp is not embittered, the condition of millions like him is a cause of the war:

"'Psychotechnic government had failed to solve the problems of Earth's adjustment to living on a high technological level. Conditions worsened until all too many people were ready to try desperation measures. The Humanist revolution was the desperation measure that succeeded in being tried.'" (p. 87)

As often, I could quote more but must close the quotation marks somewhere. This is an early work by Anderson and here he is using a character, the Martian academic, to summarize an entire period of this future history.

War And Time Travel

Imagine:

you know as a historical fact that there will be a global nuclear exchange a year from now;

you can time travel.

You will not die when everyone else does because you will travel far enough into the past that you will have died of old age long before World War III. However, everyone will be dead a year from now.

I think that this would make an effective film or TV sf series: someone develops time travel, explores the future, learns of the war, returns to the present, investigates ways of preventing the war, learns that this is impossible and, at the outbreak of war, escapes into the past. Subsequent installments would show the protagonist surviving in an earlier period and exploring the last days a few more times but always returning to their new home era before the end.

I mention this idea first because I have thought of it before in relation to one of the Terminator films and secondly because the hero of Poul Anderson's "Wildcat" learns, while in the Jurassic, that, back home, the Cold War will go nuclear about a year after the current twentieth-century base date. If we knew for certain that this was going to happen, then we would at least be able to prepare inwardly for it. And time travel would help.

Assaulted Senses

Poul Anderson, "Wildcat" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 7-57.

In the opening paragraph:

rain is hot and heavy;

the sky is hidden;

air stinks of swamp;

a floodlight glares;

an engine mutters;

a bull brontosaur cries;

there is a sound of thunder.

 

I think that this means that the brontosaur's cry sounds like thunder, not that there is thunder.

 

In the second paragraph:

 

boots resound;

clothes sog with sweat;

rain goes down Herries' collar.

 

In the third and fourth paragraphs, a plesiosaur attacks Herries and its scream hurts his ears when it takes a bullet.

 

We do not yet know that this is time travel. In sf, dinosaurs can show up on other planets or in hidden valleys etc. Meanwhile, however, Anderson gets us straight into the action by assaulting three of the senses.

Out In The Weather

When Imric the elf-earl rides out at night:

"Presences moved in the night, but they were not men -" (The Broken Sword, p. 20)

We expect other supernatural beings but the presences turn out to be a wolf, a wildcat and small animals which:

"...were aware of the elf-earl's passage and shrank deeper into the gloom." (ibid.)

Animals would sense what most human beings would not.

In the elven castle, which looks like a tor, flutes have "...voices like mountain brooks..." (p. 21) and a troll-woman's voice is "...like a thunder..." (p. 22) Again, supernatural beings merge with natural phenomena. The troll is a prisoner and there are dwarf thralls. We can safely deduce that in this narrative every kind of mythological being exists.

"Mountainous in the east, with runes of lighting scribbled across, a storm stood on the horizon." (p. 23)

"...lighting..." should be "lightning"?

We have become very familiar with wild winds in Anderson's works and, sure enough, in the next sentence:

"Wind hooted and howled." (ibid.)

Shortly after that, thunder is:

"...boom and bang of great wheels across the sky." (ibid.)

No sooner have we thought of Thor than:

"Imric urged his horse to yet wilder speed. He had no wish to meet Thor out here in the night." (ibid.)

Gods also exist and an elf fears a god as the animals feared the elf. After stealing a human child, Imric sees Odin leading the Wild Hunt. A bad sign...

Finally, at the beginning of Chapter IV, the stolen child, Skafloc, begins to grow up in Alfheim where elven lays are:

"...like sea and wind and soughing branches." (p. 26)

Other Beings
Skirnir, messenger of the Aesir, attends Skafloc's naming-feast.
Sprites, dimly seen, inhabit waterfalls.
Gnomes live under trees.
Goblins live in caves.
Skafloc meets an exiled faun.

In the south:

Pan is dead;
the priests of the new god cut down the sacred groves;
exorcisms have killed dryads;
temples are empty and crumbling;
nymphs and Olympians are no more.

One world culture is being imposed.

Meanwhile, Skafloc, bridging the realms of men and elves, also learns from foxes and otters which might be kin to elves.

Poul Anderson's Time Travel II

The time travel stories by Poul Anderson that I would include in a revised Past Times are, in this order:

"Wildcat"
"The Nest"
"The Little Monster"
"The Man Who Came Early"
"Welcome"
"Time Heals"
"Flight to Forever"

The other stories in the original Past Times should, of course, be preserved elsewhere. In particular, "Eutopia" deserves to be included in another (proposed) collection:

The Old Phoenix and other Universes
"The House of Sorrows"
"Eutopia"
"House Rule"
"Losers' Night"

The seven stories in the proposed Past Times: Revised Edition span the geological past, the historical past, the near future and the ultimate cosmic future, then return to 1973 in a story published in 1950. These are independent stories, each presenting an instance of time travel in a distinct scenario.

If Anderson's "Time Patrol" (1955) had not initiated a series that spanned his career, then it would have made an appropriate concluding item for PT:RE. However, it differs from the previous seven in two respects. First, it addresses and answers the question, "Can the past be changed?" Its answer is subtle and not fully coherent in my opinion, but I have discussed this before.

Secondly, it presents not just another single, finite application of the time travel concept but a vast time traveling organization spanning and overseeing human history in its entirety. This was clearly the premise for a series and a second story, "Delenda Est", was published later that year.

"History was divided into milieus, with a head office located in a major city for a selected twenty-year period (disguised by some ostensible activity such as commerce) and various branch offices. For his time, there were three milieus: the Western world, headquarters in London; Russia, in Moscow; Asia, in Peiping; each in the easygoing years 1890-1910, when concealment was less difficult than in later decades, when there were smaller offices..."
-Time Patrol (New York, 2006), p. 13.

"...his time..." turns out to mean 1850-2000. Two decades is a very short time by comparison with a century and a half or even an expected human lifetime, let alone the indefinitely extended lifespan of a Time Patroller. Do all Patrol members receive the futuristic longevity treatment or only those who need it more because they time travel a lot? Those who do get it, which I assume is all, have to move to a different public identity in a different milieu after a few decades. We see just a little of this happening but obviously there is much more that we could be told about the Patrol.

We ordinary people work, retire and die whereas Patrollers work indefinitely and die by accident eventually so their lives are completely different from ours. A single Patroller could work for the entire twenty years in London, then Moscow, then Peiping, then somewhere/when else and so on indefinitely. The series does not begin to address such ramifications.

"Temporal, the artificial language with which Patrolmen from all ages could communicate without being understood by strangers, was a miracle of logically organized expressiveness." (p. 12)

Yet:

"'Merau Varagan, you are under arrest by the Time Patrol," [Everard] called in Temporal." (p. 278)

- so Varagan's time criminal group, the Exaltationists, must not only have stolen timecycles but also somehow learned the secret language?

The Time Patrol is time travel fans' heaven.

Plesiosaur

There is a Wikipedia article on "Plesiosaurus" of the Jurassic Period and another on "plesiosaurs" of the Mesozoic Era. It makes sense when you start to read them.

"The plesiosaur hissed monstrously and flipper-slapped the water. It was like a cannon going off."

-"Wildcat," p. 7.

This is a telling detail. Flippers in water become wings in air. Once, walking near the River Lune, I suddenly heard a loud furious sound as if someone had gone berserk and begun to chastise the water with a paddle. It was swans taking off, their wings striking the water. I have only heard this once.

Some of us thought, based on a certain amount of evidence, that there were plesiosaur-like animals in Loch Ness but they would have been confirmed by now if they had been there. A swan, seen in conditions of poor visibility by someone mistaken about scale and distance, looks exactly like a plesiosaur.

What Can Time Travellers Do?

I will list fifteen answers to this question, then list the titles of twelve relevant works, all but one by Poul Anderson.

(i) Explore the future.
(ii) Influence the future.
(iii) Become involved in circular causality paradoxes.
(iv) Time travel back and forth within slower than light interstellar spaceships.
(v) Use modern knowledge to survive in the past.
(vi) Perish in the past because of lack of appropriate skills.
(vii) Raid and plunder through time under cover of recorded atrocities.
(viii) Try to change the past for good or ill.
(ix) Study and record past events in order to prevent temporal alterations.
(x) Wage war through time.
(xi) Escape from an imminent nuclear war.
(xii) Exile criminals to the past.
(xiii) Retire to a preferred earlier period.
(xiv) Trade through time.
(xv) If seriously ill, hope to benefit from future medicine.

The Time Machine
"Flight To Forever"
There Will Be Time
The Corridors Of Time
"The Little Monster"
"The Man Who Came Early"
"The Nest"
"Welcome"
The Time Patrol series
"Wildcat"
"My Object All Sublime"
"Time Heals"

A Century Hence II

"Wildcat."

See A Century Hence.

Team A: 

found that Earth in the twenty first century was sterile although the radioactivity had died down sufficiently that they themselves were not in danger;

estimated that the nuclear exchange had occurred about one year after the twentieth-century base date.

Team B found that:

in AD 100,000,000, plants are re-evolving;

however, they have not yet released enough oxygen to make the atmosphere breathable.

The Jurassic base is supplied with agricultural, industrial and scientific equipment, canned food, microfilmed culture and extra personnel, obviously both male and female. How long did they survive in the past and did they make it into space? There is no sequel.