Arctangential

I finished The Time Patrol at lunch yesterday . It went quickly, mainly because I only read about 1/3 of the book. It’s another collection of Time Patrol short stories, but most of them are stories that I’d read in the previous books in the series. I only bought this volume because it had a single new novella in it — Star of the Sea. So, I only read about 100 pages of this book.

The new story was OK, but not amazing. It was about some changes that happened in the first century AD, and Everard and his assistant are sent to investigate. They trace the disturbance to a young woman who is stirring up barbarian tribes to attack Roman settlements and cities. While this conflict is expected, her presence is making things far worse for the Romans than they ought to be. The two investigators travel back in time, trying to determine what caused her to be such a powerful leader. They end up saving her life from an attack when she’s fairly young, and it turns out that this is the event which causes her to believe herself to be protected by the gods, which is why she ends up galvanizing the various barbarian tribes against Rome. That is, they were the cause of the event they were investigating — typical time travel stuff. Nothing special, but I think the well is dry on this one, and somebody convinced Anderson to pull from it just one more time. Anyways, I’m done with that series now.

I’ve now started a new book and a new series — Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series, the first book of which is aptly titled The Dying Earth. It’s not bad so far.

I finished The Rebirth of Wonder last night. The book actually had two stories in it — the titular one and another called The Final Folly of Captain Dancy. I think I’ve read both before, in various anthologies, but I like Watt-Evans enough that I don’t mind rereading his stuff in order to have a complete book collection.

The Rebirth of Wonder is about a small-town theater which becomes, for various reasons, the location for a great magic ritual. It turns out that the world’s magic is almost gone, and all of the remaining magicians gather in Brampton, MA to perform a rite which will create a new source of magic for the world. The story is told from the point of view of young Art Dunham, the theater’s technician, who sees the ritual unfold and in the end must make an important decision about the fate of the ritual. The second story is a funny tale about a pirate first mate who has to complete his captain’s final plan after he slips and dies. He has to piece together what the plan was based on circumstance and various ship’s crew coming to him with questions on the captain’s final orders. Very clever and very funny.

I’m now reading the final Time Patrol book by Poul Anderson, aptly titled The Time Patrol.

I finished The Shield of Time last night. As with all of Anderson’s other Time Patrol books, I enjoyed this one, although there aren’t a whole lot of new ideas to discuss in it. These are the same stories we’ve seen before — bad guys are messing with history, good guys are accidentally messing with history, and sometimes history is messing with itself. This time though we get to see Sicily in the early part of the dark ages, proto-human tribes crossing from Asia into North America, and pre-Roman empire Europe, which are pretty interesting eras, and Anderson certainly knows how to tell his history. However, instead of discussing the book in detail, I think I’m going to talk a little about some of the interesting things Anderson did with time lines in order to make his stories dramatic and readable.

So there’s the standard linear time line of reality with which we’re all familiar. Then there’s the discontinuous time line of the time traveler, with which I hope most pop culturally-aware people are also familiar. The tricky thing that Anderson’s done here is invent a third kind of time line which allows him to write more interesting and dramatic stories in the time-travel milieu. I call it the “narrative time line”, or the “5th dimensional time line”. Basically, his plots tend to go something like this:

Our hero will jump from 1178 into, let’s say 1985, and discover that it’s very different than he remembers it. He does some historical checking and finds that in this alternate universe, a general in Rome in 1392 died in his sleep, where in the “normal” universe, he lived to be an old man. This has changed history dramatically. Our hero goes back in time to 1392, discovers that some nefarious time traveler is plotting to kill the general, and stops them. He then jumps back to 1985, which is back to normal.

The sneaky thing here is the implied linearity of time when there is none. When he jumps from 1178 to 1985 the first time, he enters an alternate universe because somebody has killed a general in the meantime. But what meantime? In order for that kind of thing I’ve described to work, you need some kind of running time line that runs orthogonal to everything else in the universe, just like time lines run orthogonal to our position in space. You need some kind of purely linear time to which the entire 4-dimensional continuum is tied, so that “while” our hero is busy saving the general, people who jump past 1392 end up in the alternate universe, and “after” he’s done, they go into the correct universe. I think that this concept is very clever, and Anderson is the only person I’ve seen to use it in time travel fiction. Most other stories have a kind of “you did it because that’s how history went” kind of thing, and even when it looks like the heroes saved the say it turns out that they just managed to do the thing that everybody already knew happened. With this secondary time line, instead you can get a real sense that the heroes are in real danger and can mess up and lose the “real” world. It makes for a better story.

Reading back, I’m not convinced that made any sense. Oh well.

I’m now reading The Rebirth of Wonder by Lawrence Watt-Evans. Fun stuff.

The other day, we had:

Dennis: http://smalleiffel.loria.fr/man/short.html — ice pick to the forehead.

And then a little later:

Me: I should write a filter that takes a webpage as input and randomly blinkifies 1-3 letter segments of it

And then later that day, I had a small brain attack, and I came up with this:

http://skrewtape.com/blinkorator.pl

Have fun!

Note: Some pages won’t work with it. Some browsers won’t work with it, either. If your browser doesn’t work, try switching to firefox, it’s a good idea any way. Also, keep in mind that a URL has a scheme in it, always. That is, “http://www.slutfarm.com/” is a URL, but just “www.hotcockmachine.com” is not.

I finished Peony last night. I really enjoyed it a lot, much more than I thought I would, considering it’s a non-genre novel written in the late 40s. It’s about a Jewish family living in the Hunan region of China in what I expect is the mid-18th century. The plot structure is a little bit odd — the first two-thirds are about the decision faced by David, the only son of the Jewish family, as to his marriage. He can either keep to his mother’s wishes and marry a Jewish girl whom he does not particularly love, or he can marry the Chinese girl with whom he is quite smitten. This plot line draws a parallel to the subtext of the novel, which is about the struggle of the Jewish community in China to maintain its identity in the face of passive yet pervasive cultural integration.

The choice is made for him, however, and with roughly 1/3 of the book remaining, it changes into a fairly standard domestic politics novel. David’s parents both die and he’s made head of the household. He has many children with his wife, they have a minor run-in with the empresses and everybody, more or less, lives happily ever after. The book’s title references a young bondmaid named Peony who may or may not be in love with David. Most of the story is told from her point of view, and she has some amount to do with moving things along, but she’s mostly the reader surrogate.

I’ve now started Poul Anderson’s The Shield of Time, which is a novel (for real this time!) set in the Time Patrol universe. I’m enjoying it so far.

On of the coolest things about reading old books is that sometimes you find stuff inside of them. In the case of Peony, I found this neat coupon: (click for bigger)

Front:

Back:

I finished Time Patrolman at lunch today. (I read a lot at lunch.) I was mistaken earlier — it isn’t a novel, it’s actually a pair of novellas. The first is about Manse Everard, who was the hero of all of the short stories of the previous Time Patrol book that I read. In it, he has to foil a group of time-travelling villains who hold an entire city of ransom, threatening to blow up Tyre, home of King Solomon, unless their demands are met. The second novella is not about a time patrolman but instead a time researcher, who goes back to 4th century Scandinavia in order to chart the origin and evolution of the Norse epic poems. Of course, he ends up getting personally involved with the people and not just the stories, and ends up unduly influencing history. Everard shows up and shows him how he can fix the time-line, but it does involve a painful sacrifice on his part.

I may have mentioned it before, but one thing I really like about these books is that they don’t gimmick up the time travel. A lot of time travel stories focus in on the foibles of time travel itself (like Heinlein’s classic By His Bootstraps, or Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself), but Anderson here treats time travel like space opera treats faster-than-light travel: it’s a means to getting the story told. It does what it needs to do, and it only makes things complicated when it serves to make the story interesting. Of course Anderson is too good to make all that seem arbitrary, but the point is that the stories are not about time travel, they are about people who use time travel to have exciting adventures.

My book now is Peony, by Pearl S. Buck. It’s good so far.

I finished Newer York last night. It was pretty good, overall — a collection of science fiction and fantasy short stories about New York, edited by Lawrence Watt-Evans, whose writing I enjoy quite a bit. Some of the stories weren’t very good, with the predictably awful example of Piers Anthony’s contribution, Cloister, which, among other things, details how King Brook and Queen Lyn got together to form Brooklyn. Most of them were very good though — Mike Resnick’s Post Time in Pink, about a real-world New York detective solving the case of a purloined racing elephant (pink) in an alternate New York, is hilarious and clever. Another impressive story, Candelabra and Diamonds by Don Sakers, manages to be a classic space opera, but set in New York City.

Now I’m reading Poul Anderson’s Time Patrolman, a novel set in the same time-traveling universe as the book I read previously.