Tuesday 15 July 2014

Progressing The Time Patrol

(The publisher is printing a copy of Eon in response to my order. It will arrive in about a week, while I am away for a week.) 

As Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series progresses, gaps between installments decrease. For Everard:

"Star of the Sea"
"The Year of the Ransom"
"Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks"
The Shield Of Time (three consecutive stories) and
"Death and the Knight"

- occur in fairly quick succession, with little or nothing happening between them, whereas the earlier six stories are more widely spaced and there is some mention of other assignments that are not described, like one in Scandinavia.

In "Christmas in Godwanaland" (see recent posts), Robert Silverberg adds several other miscellaneous cases, in:

Kubla Khan's Peking;
San Francisco, '06;
Sarajevo, '14;
the 80th century;
the Cambrian Period.

In fact, "...hundreds of other missions..." -Bear, Dozois, Eds, Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds (Burton, MI, 2014), p. 218.

I would prefer a story that progressed Everard's career after "Death and the Knight." The Time Patrol's organizational "milieus" for Everard's period will end in 2000 (I think) and, in any case, he himself must soon relocate after decades without aging in a New York apartment. I suspect that, like the Farnesses, he will move to somewhen like 1930's New York, thus staying in the same, Western, milieu. On that basis, the series could be prolonged for a comparable number of episodes without too disruptive a change of scene.

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