Sunday 20 September 2015

An Understated Time War

Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time is explicitly about the great time war between the Wardens and the Rangers. However, a potentially even more destructive time war, between the Time Patrol and the Exaltationists, is almost hidden in Anderson's Time Patrol series. (The attached image shows an Exaltationist and a Patrolman.)

The four battles in this second war are to be found in just two of the ten stories in Time Patrol and in just one of the six Parts of The Shield Of Time. The War against the Exaltationists could have filled a volume in its own right although that is hardly necessary.

Three times a squadron of Patrol timecycles attacks an Exaltationist position and three times the leading Exaltationist, Merau Varagan, expounds his views in dialogue with a Patrolman.

Manse Everard almost captures Varagan in Colombia and Peru and does in Phoenicia and at last captures Varagan's clone mate in Bactria. End of Exaltationists but we might not appreciate how long the pursuit has been.

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