Delenda Est
- by Poul Anderson
- Novelette
- Science Fiction
- Adults
- Definite Time Travel
- English
- “Delenda Est” by Poul Anderson, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1955.
Curse those rogue time travelers! Who do they think they are? And what gives them the right to make Hannibal victorious in that classic Punic conflict? And what can Patrolman Manse Everard and his Venusian partner Van Sarawak do in an altered 20th-century world to make it right again?
—Michael Main
Events are the result of a complex. There are no single causes. That’s why it’s so hard to change history. If I went back to, say, the Middle Ages, and shot one of FDR’s Dutch forebears, he’ll still be born in the late nineteenth century—because he and his genes resulted fom the entire world of his ancestors, and there’d have been compensation. But evey so often, a really key event does occur. Some one happening is a nexus of so many world lines that its outcome is decisive for the whole future.
Tags
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- Time Periods
- Stone Age (3.4 Ma to 3000 BC: Paleo/Epipaleo/Meso/Neo/Chalcolithic): the Pleistocene and other early ages with Time Patrol bases
- Ancient History (3000 BC to AD 476: Bronze/Iron Ages): the Battle of Trebia, 218 BC
- Circa AD 1960 to 1969: Everard’s home time of 23 October 1960
- Timeline Models
- Isolation from Timeline Change: At the moment of a timeline change, any time travelers who are living in a time that’s before a change occurs remain unchanged even if they were born or lived after the change. Note: We don’t know what it means to be living at one time versus another “at the moment of a timeline change,” but it may have something to do with narrative time.
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Narrative Hypertime: This second story in the Time Patrol series makes it clear that changing the timeline has a curious effect: From the moment of change onward, the “old” timeline is erased and a new timeline comes into being. To quote Everard: It had never been.
This timeline model requires a narrative hypertime. - Proper Timeline: Granted, the survivors’ plain duty was to restore the “original” time track.
- Resilient Timeline: Events are the result of a complex. There are no single causes. That’s why it’s so hard to change history.
- Return to a Changed Timeline Where You Don’t Exist: Among other things, the change to the timeline has wiped out Everard and Van Sarawak.
- Time Travel Methods
- Time Fliers: the time hoppers
- Themes
- Future Is “Up”: Then we’re still upstairs of the turning point.
- Intertemporal Communication Systems between Time Travel Agents/Offices/etc.: The the message capsules began jumping through spacetime.
- Language Difficulties: Even the hypnotic language-teacher isn’t much use if you didn’t know ahead of time what language the natives would be speaking.
- Time Cops
- Real-World Tags
- Groupings
Variants
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- “Delenda Est” by Poul Anderson, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1955.