Trespass
by Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson
The Internet Time Travel Database
Poul Anderson
writer
- Filter: Show all works, including those with no time phenomena.
- Found: 33 results in 2.09ms
If you went back to, I would guess, 1946, and worked to prevent your parents’ marriage
in 1947, you would still have existed in that year; you would not go out of existence
just because you had influenced events. The same would apply even if you had only been in
1946 one microsecond before shooting the man who would otherwise have become your father.
Now, then. There is one point on which I must set you right. The end of the world is not
coming in two years. This I know.
The story was a nice forerunner to Silverberg’s “Hawksbill Station.”
But we are mortal men. And we have free will. The fixed-time concept need not, logically,
produce fatalism; after all, Herries, man’s will is itself one of the links in teh
causal chain. I suspect that this irrational fatalism is an important reason why
twentieth-century civilization is approaching suicide. If we think we know our future is
unchangeable, if our every action is foreordained, if we are doomed already, what’s the
use of trying? Why go through all the pain of thought, of seeking an answer and
struggling to make others accept it? But if we really believed in ourselves, we woiuld
look for a solution, and find one.
In the case of a missing man, you were not required to search for him just because a
record somewhere said you had done so. But how else would you stand a chance of finding
him? You might possibly go back and thereby change events so that you did find him after
all—in which case the report you filed would “always” have recorded your success,
and you alone would know the “former” truth.
Your world is a slope and you roll down it all the time. Down and down until you wear out
and die.
Tom departed from the late twentieth century because of its unpleasant political climate, but the description of Barlow’s orginal time reads more as if Anderson got a peek at 2016 Donald Trump.
Disgust would be the simplest word.
The homesickeness, though, that’s what eats you. Little things you never noticed. Some
particular food, the way people walk, the games played, the small-talk topics. Even the
constellations. They're different in the future. The sun has traveled that far in its
galactic orbit.
For many years, I thought this novel was part of Poul’s Time Patrol series, until Bob Hasse mentioned this as one of his favorites that is not in the series. The beginning reminded me of Heinlein’s Glory Road, and the rest is reminiscent of Asimov’s The End of Eternity, both of which captivated me in the summer of 1968. Poul’s book holds up well in that company.
A series of parallel black lines, several inches apart, extended from it, some distance
across the corridor floor. At the head of each was a brief inscription, in no alphabet he
could recognize. But every ten feet or so a number was added. He saw 4950, 4951,
4952. . .
She was lean, though full enough in hips and firm breasts to please any man, and
long-limbed, swan-necked, head proudly held. That head was dolichocephalic but wide
across brow and cheeks, tapering toward the chin, with, a classically straight nose and a
full and mobile mouth which was a touch too big for conventional beauty. Arching brows
and sooty lashes framed large bright eyes whose hazel shifted momentarily from leaf-green
to storm-gray. Her black hair, thick and wavy, fell past her shoulders; a white streak
ran back from the forehead. Except for suntan, a dusting of freckles, a few fine wrinkles
and crow’s-feet, a beginning dryness, her skin was clear and fair. He guessed her age
as about equal to his.
No, no, no. I suppose it’s simply a logical impossibility to change the past, same as
it’s logically impossible for a uniformly colored spot to be both red and green.
The Mediterranean floor lay ten thousand feet below sea level. The inflow took most of
that drop within a fifty-mile strait. Its volume amounted to ten thousand cubic miles a
year, a hundred Victoria Falls or a thousand Niagaras.
The time-travel connection is slight in this long story, but it is relevant to Joelle. As I read though, I wondered whether the story could have been much more had the time-travel element been taken more to heart.
He swept out of the cell, through space and through time, at light-speed across unseen
prairies, into the storms that raged down a great particle accelerator.
The title avatar of Anderson’s book is present as one of the portal exploration team members right from the start of the goings-on, but the name avatar isn’t used until the conclusion of the book—and the meaning of the word is the one that predates our modern digital view.
For us, approximately eight Terrestrial years have passed. It turns out that the
T-machine is indeed a time machine of sorts, as well as a space transporter. The
Betans—the beings whom we followed—calculated our course to bring us out near the
date when we left.