Wednesday 30 July 2014

The Time Machine And The Time Patrol

The Time Traveler's single Time Machine is spatially stationary whereas the Time Patrol's many timecycles can hover, fly and teleport as well as time travel but the most curious difference is that a timecycle disappears from one set of spatio-temporal coordinates and appears at another, simultaneously from its rider's or riders' perspective(s), whereas the Time Machine and its single Traveler remain invisibly and intangibly present while the rest of the universe fast forwards or rewinds around them.

The Time Traveler erroneously ascribes both his undetectability and his "time traveling" to the acceleration of his motion along the temporal dimension although he has already correctly stated that everything merely extends along that dimension. If everything did move along time and if he accelerated, then he would leave everything else behind. He is clearly not accelerating but decelerating all his psychophysical processes almost to the point of stasis and should remain both visible and tangible like an impregnable statue.

Humanity devolves into Eloi and Morlocks or evolves into Danellians. Wells addresses the future of man and life whereas Anderson addresses many historical periods. The Patrol addresses all those "...curious possibilities of anachronism and of utter confusion..." that time traveling suggests to Wells' outer narrator.

Anderson is Wells' main successor.

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