Friday 1 August 2014

The Time Machine And The Time Patrol IV

HG Wells' Time Traveler sits on his Time Machine and Poul Anderson's Time Patrolmen sit on their time cycles whereas other fictional temporal vehicles enclose their passengers.

Wells colorfully describes 802,701 AD, the Further Vision and the experience of time traveling whereas Anderson, equally colorfully, describes many historical and prehistorical periods, including 31,275,389 BC and the transition from the Miocene to the Pliocene epoch.

Both authors describe time travel technology and analyze historical processes:

how the conquest of nature and the creation of a paradisal environment cause the Victorian bourgeoisie and proletariat to devolve into Eloi and Morlocks;

how a change to the course of events in ancient Tyre or Persia would have transformed history.

These two works share several comparable features not found in any other accounts of time travel.

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