Line #61 Literature/TimePatrol


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6	''Time Patrol'' is a series of works, mostly short stories, by Creator/PoulAnderson. They take place in a universe where the resolution to the GrandfatherParadox is that you now exist without ever having had a father, and the TimePolice relentlessly work to keep time nevertheless on the same path -- while ruthlessly expurgating futures, filled with living beings, that do not conform to it. Doing this often requires the sacrifice of time travelers or those they love.
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8	Most of the stories feature Manse Everard, a 20th-century American and Unattached agent, as the main character, or as a secondary one. Many crucial incidents feature lesser-known history, such as the UsefulNotes/PunicWars.
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10	!!Works included
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12	* "Time Patrol" (1955)
13	* "Brave to be a King" (1959)
14	* "Gibraltar Falls" (1975)
15	* "The Only Game in Town" (1960)
16	* "Delenda Est" (1955)
17	* "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks" (1983)
18	* "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" (1983)
19	* "Star of the Sea" (1991)
20	* ''The Year of the Ransom'' (1988)
21	* ''The Shield of Time'' (1990)
22	* "Death and the Knight" (1995)
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25	!!Tropes featured
26	* AboveGoodAndEvil: In the very first story, the instructor, describing how the Danellians (our far future descendants) insisted on the founding of the Patrol, said they were neither benevolent nor malevolent, they were so far beyond us.
27	* AlwaysSaveTheGirl: In "Delenda Est", Van Sarawak drags Deirdre along when Everard rescues him, without regard for what it does to the rescue.
28	* AncientAstronauts: Used, with time travelers rather than aliens, in "The Sorrows of Odin the Goth". The time-traveling historian Carl knows that his travels among the Goths are liable to make the natives think he's a god, so he dresses in such a way that stories of his exploits would be folded into the preexisting mythology of Wodan (aka Odin). It doesn't work out quite how Carl intended it...
29	* TheAtoner: Harpagus in "Brave To Be A King". Dying, he confesses that he had forced a time traveler to become Cyrus because he had been sent to kill the true Cyrus, and he had done all of it to atone. [[spoiler:When Manse figures out how to keep the true Cyrus alive, one thing he uses to motivate himself is that Harpagus will no longer suffer from the terrible guilt, even though Manse will remember it]].
30	* BittersweetEnding: Typically, because the Patrol will sacrifice anyone to preserve the time line. Manse struggles to save Keith in "Brave To Be A King" -- after a LoveTriangle resolved with Keith as the winner -- but only manages to get him back after years and years of his life, which leave him a StrangerInAFamiliarLand, and Manse still remembers the men he killed, and how one died begging for {{Forgiveness}} and citing all he did as TheAtoner, even though his efforts had written those out of history.
31	* BlueBlood: Deidre in "Delenda Est". She has an estate she can bring Everard and Van Sarawak to when making their imprisonment less onerous.
32	* BornInTheWrongCentury: Everard derides such people in his own century while back in DarkAgeEurope, wishing that people from his time who talked of the "noble Nordic" could see the Dark Ages peasants he is seeing.
33	* BriarPatching: In "The Only Game In Town", Manse warns his Mongol captors that the modern distilled liquors he's carrying are too strong for them. They disagree, take it as a dare, and [[CantHoldHisLiquor find out the hard way]] that he wasn't kidding.
34	* ChildrenAreInnocent:
35	** In "Brave To Be A King", Manse prevents an infanticide by telling the king that, among other things, that he must not shed the children's innocent blood.
36	** In "Delenda Est", when they threaten revenge, Deirdre pleads not the children, they had nothing to do with it.
37	* TheChosenOne: Invoked in "Brave To Be A King" to restore history, where Manse prevents an infanticide by telling the king that, among other things, the child is favored of the gods.
38	* ColorCodedPatrician: Invoked in "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks", where none of the famous purple dye is visible for sale at Tyre. Everard reflects on how its expensiveness caused that, and led to this trope.
39	* CreepyCrows: "Delenda Est" has them flying over the battlefield.
40	* CultureClash: All those eras. "Gibraltar Falls" in particular has, Feliz, from a [[LadyLand Matriarchy era]], who has to fight to see men as equal -- just as men from other eras have to fight to see women as equal, Thomas notes.
41	* {{Demythification}}: In "Brave To Be A King", Manse finds that the MosesInTheBulrushes legend is being told about Cyrus the Great in his lifetime, and learns that the actual Cyrus was exposed and killed, and the recovered one was actually the time traveler Manse was looking for. To keep history on track, they go back and intimidate the grandfather out of trying to kill Cyrus — so that the legend must have become attached to Cyrus at a later date.
42	* DirtyBusiness: Several things done to keep the time line in order.
43	** In "No Truce With Kings", a newly arrived alien finds the deaths resulting from their manipulations horrible; the old hand explains it's minimizing them in the long run, though nothing will wash the blood off.
44	** In "Delenda Est", Everard lies to Deirdre about his presence in her AlternateHistory, and then about their ability to go back — they will not return her to it, to be blotted out with the rest of it, but he feels guilty about both the lies and the way they are consigning everyone in that history to non-existence.
45	* DistressedDude:
46	** "Brave To Be A King": Finding where Denison is in time and extricating him.
47	** "Delenda Est": They deduce the deaths of the Scipios in battle caused the AlternateHistory and go to rescue them.
48	* DreamingOfThingsToCome: In "Brave To Be A King", Manse is told of how a neighboring king dreamed that his grandson would be the death of him, and is plotting infanticide as a result.
49	* ExposedToTheElements: Discussed in "Delenda Est" — a Cro-Magnon guide is dressed rather like an Eskimo, and Everard derides the way no one credited them with enough sense to wear lots of clothes in a glacial period.
50	* FearOfThunder: In "The Only Game In Town", the Mongols refuse to be afraid of the Time Patrol's technological gadgets because the only thing a Mongol should fear is thunder.
51	* FishOutOfWater: In "Delenda Est", Deirdre is this after their rescue. They tell her YouCantGoHomeAgain but [[DirtyBusiness lie about why]]: they are obliterating her AlternateHistory. [[spoiler:At the end, one rescuer has her brought to his era on Venus, as the most like her own; Everard doesn't argue the point.]]
52	* ForWantOfANail: The series carefully explains that this is not a problem, because the timeline can absorb quite a number of changes without really changing. Of course, by the same token, if someone does change it, it's hard to move back.
53	* GodGuise: All the time. Babylonian recruits are told the Time Patrol is about a war of the gods. Two agents go to Dark Ages England and leave their hosts with the claim to be gods (checking on SacredHospitality, no doubt). Two agents appear as angels and tell a king not to try to kill his grandson.
54	* HomeSweetHome: Many members of the Patrol have more than a touch of this, and work in a given era, checking for problems and providing other agents with what they need to operate in them.
55	* InHarmsWay: All members of the Patrol have some of this to a greater or lesser extent, Manse and other Unattached Agents in particular.
56	* IWantMyBelovedToBeHappy: In "Brave To Be A King", Manse, having lost in the LoveTriangle, wrestles down the temptation to obey the Time Patrol rules in the easiest way, which would leave his rival stuck in the past.
57	* JadeColoredGlasses: In "Gibraltar Falls", Manse admits that Thomas succeeded correctly, and he had resisted not because it was wrong but because he had seen too often when it could not be done.
58	* LadyLand: In "Gibraltar Falls", Feliz is from an era of a Matriarchy. She has to struggle to view men as equals — just as men from other eras struggle with the women in the Patrol.
59	* LiesToChildren: Or rather, to non-time travelers. Justified in-universe, as an instructor tells the recruits that they can get it because they come from industrialized eras; a Roman could not handle the idea of machines, and as for Babylonians, they have to be fed a line about a war between gods. When one recruit asks what they are being told, the answer is "the truth, but only as much as they can handle".
60	* LightIsGood: Invoked in the Persian setting of "Brave To Be A King", where a beggar urges, "Alms for the love of Light!" Later, [[spoiler: two time travelers makes themselves glow to convince a king that they are heavenly messengers.]]
61	* LoveTriangle: In "Brave to be a King", Manse had lost out in one in the BackStory. When Cynthia comes to him to help save her husband, Manse wrestles with the temptation to follow the rules easily -- at Denison's expense -- because of this. [[spoiler:At the end, Denison realizes that his years in the past with Cassadane meant more to him that his brief marriage with Cynthia, even though he had chosen Cassadane because she reminded him of Cynthia.]]
62	* {{Macguffin}}: In the very first story, it's the chest of radioactive materials found in a Dark Ages tomb during UsefulNotes/VictorianBritain. They don't merely have to get it back, they have to get it back before it was buried.
63	* MakeWrongWhatOnceWentRight: The villains often are after this. Once, the heroes have to do it, and Manse realizes that they are not protecting the "real" history but the history that leads to them.
64	* MeaningfulRename: In "Gibraltar Falls", Manse explains at the end that [[spoiler:Feliz can't return to her own era under her own name, that's recorded history that she never did; she can, however, change her name and shift to a different one. Thomas offers "Mrs. Thomas Noruma".]]
65	* TheMenFirst: In "The Only Game In Town", the Mongol commander starts to object to the men sharing the distilled liquor, but stifles it: officers share equally with the humblest of their men.
66	* MosesInTheBulrushes: In "Brave To Be A King", the story of how Cyrus was like this was brought up and dismissed. [[spoiler:A time traveler was taken for the abandoned infant, now grown up.]]
67	* MurderTheHypotenuse: In "Brave To Be A King", Manse feels the temptation, when he doesn't even have to kill the man. According to Time Patrol rules, leaving Denison in place, which would preserve history, is the right thing to do. He'd live out his life, and his widow would doubtlessly grieve and recover.
68	* NonLinearCharacter: the Time Patrol operatives can’t “see” all times at once, but they know generally what’s happened and what’s supposed to happen at any point in the time-line. It’s their job to make sure the time-line doesn’t change. It’s also implied that the more experienced Patrol agents are much older than they look, since they have access to future health care and don’t live their lives in chronological order.
69	* OntologicalInertia: There is a principle of "temporal inertia" which acts like this. It is very difficult to make substantial changes to the time-line, since most likely subsequent events will coalesce in a way that maintains the overall historical status quo. However, the flip side of the principle is that once changes ''are'' made to the time-line, it is similarly very difficult to undo those changes and return the time-line to its original status.
70	* PrimeTimeline: {{Zigzagged}}. While the Time Police are working to protect ''a'' timeline, it's not the original, and there's eventually action to prevent the original from re-asserting itself.
71	* TheReveal: In "Delenda Est", the jump forward in time reveals tampering with history has created an AlternateHistory.
72	* SacredHospitality: In "Time Patrol", two agents claim to be Woden and Thundor and to watch over the family henceforth as they leave — in an obvious nod to the many myths.
73	* SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong: Possible. But dangerous. This is both a villain's motive, and a constant temptation to the members of the Patrol, who can sometimes even pull it off with carefully enough handled TrickedOutTime.
74	* Literature/SherlockHolmes: In "Time Patrol", where the Victorian era office would like to hire a contemporary detective, but the only one clever enough is probably clever enough to figure out the Time Patrol. Other clues make it clear that this unnamed detective is Holmes.
75	* StreetUrchin: Pummairam in "Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks".
76	* TakeThat: In one story, Everard wishes that people from his time — the author's own — who talked of the "noble Nordic" could see the [[MedievalMorons Dark Ages peasants]] he is seeing.
77	* TalkAboutTheWeather: In "Time Patrol", Manse observes that talking about crops and weather in Dark Ages England is much like twentieth-century Middle Western America.
78	* ThickerThanWater: In "Delenda Est", per the goal of the meddlers, both Scipios die in an early battle in the UsefulNotes/PunicWars because of this trope - the son came to the rescue of his father.
79	* TimeMachine: The members of the Patrol use vehicles ranging from one- or two-person motorcycle-like "time scooters" to larger, multi-passenger time transports.
80	* TimeTravel: The Time Patrol was ''founded'' by time travelers, and its goal is to prevent people from abusing the technology to change history.
81	* TimeTravelTenseTrouble: Averted by inventing an artificial language, called Temporal, which allows Patrolmen to discuss such matters without any of the tense problems raised in this trope. Since only Time Patrolmen learned and used Temporal, it also served as a way that Patrolmen could speak between themselves without risk of being overheard (or more accurately, understood) by others.
82	* TimeyWimeyBall: The stories are [[ShownTheirWork historically well-researched]] and confusing as '''hell.''' Among other things, the future is "uptime" and the past is "downtime," which makes it sound counterintuitively like time is a river that flows uphill. (This is consistent with convention in geology and archeology, where an earlier period is "lower" because its evidence is in deeper strata.)
83	* TrickedOutTime: Features such wonders and abuse of the self-consistency principle as when a man sees his lover falling off a cliff, he turns his head, so that he doesn't see her hit bottom precisely so he can come back and rescue her later.
84	* WillNotTellALie: Persians in "Brave To Be A King" are fanatical about this. Manse listens to a story that is clearly MosesInTheBulrushes and so a hero legend — but from a Persian, so he knows it has to be the truth.
85	* YouCantFightFate: A major theme of the stories. One character summarizes it: "Against time even the gods are powerless. I did as I was doomed to do."
86	* YouCantGoHomeAgain: Deirdre in "Delenda Est". She comes from an AlternateHistory that the Time Patrol will eradicate.
87	* YouWillBeBeethoven:
88	** In one story, a time-traveler gets pressed into taking the place of an assassinated Persian royalty; history remembers him as Cyrus the Great.
89	** In "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth", a time-traveling anthropologist is trying to find the source of a particular legend involving the god Odin. He visits a dark-ages Goth community several times over the course of decades, and the locals, noting that he never seems to age (among other reasons), decide he is Odin. At the end he has to close the StableTimeLoop by doing what Odin is described as doing in the legend, even though it means killing two of his grandsons.

Context Literature / TimePatrol