Time Police in Literature.
By Author:
- David Drake and Janet Morris had the ARC, that fought wars across different timelines.
By Title:
- Time Police agent Josie Bauer in the Callahan's Crosstime Saloon story "Have You Heard the One...". She collars the time criminal Al Phee, who's trying to change the past in a minor way to make a profit in the future. Josie revealed that she got the job from her father, a famous science-fiction writer and part-time Time Police agent. At the end of the story it's revealed that her father was in fact Philip José Farmer (she let it slip that he was writing a new Riverworld book). In the end, the Traveling Salesman was taken down by the Farmer's Daughter!
- Introduced some way into The Chronicles Of Saint Marys series after Max is relocated to an alternate timeline, these are backed by international treaty and tasked by world governments with preventing any individual country manipulating the timeline to their advantage. While the organisation as a whole has mellowed slightly over the series, when first encountered it had strong Knight Templar tendancies.
- The Temporal Rectification Division in Chrono Hustle fulfils this function.
- A variant of your typical Time Police crops up in Roger Macbride Allen's The Depths of Time novel (and its sequels). Due to how faster-than-light travel works (ships fly slower than light to a wormhole, which sends them back in time to another wormhole), it's possible for ships to arrive at destinations before they departed, which would cause all sorts of problems with reality. The Time Patrol patrols the wormholes with battleships, destroying anything that attempts to get through without proper authorization. All ships have extremely paranoid computers installed in them, which will deactivate (or outright destroy) a ship if it thinks that it has wound up in the past. The Patrol can get news before it happens, which is locked away in vaults until the event actually happens.
- In Discworld, the History Monks (the Men In Saffron, from No Such Monastery) used to be this, preventing anyone from messing around with history, and altogether "making sure tomorrow follows today correctly." And then the Glass Clock shattered, and their job changed to making sure tomorrow followed today at all. In Night Watch, Lu-Tze actually uses this concept as a metaphor during a conversation with temporally-displaced copper Sam Vimes.
- The protagonist of the Jack Chalker novel Downtiming The Night Side gets caught up in a full-scale battle over the timeline that turns out to be a second front of The War of Earthly Aggression. One side portrays themselves as time police and their opponents as terrorists. The other side doesn't bother with such niceties.
- The Eschaton in Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross is an AI using atemporal logic; it can violate causality by informing itself in the past of the results of future computation and observation. One of the things this lets it do is to observe others violating causality by the results in the future, giving the data to its past self, which can then prevent the incident occurring in the first place. It uses human agents as a first line of defense, and godlike overkill as the last to keep human history (and its own creation) intact.
- The Eternals in Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity... do not, for the most part, act as this. Instead, they constantly tinker with the timeline to maximize the overall happiness of humanity. That said, the climax of the story is them trying to fulfill a specific aspect of history as recorded...
- In Robert A. Heinlein's Future History series, after the invention of pan-universal time travel in The Number of the Beast, protagonist Lazarus Long and his allies grasp the horrific potential of a device that can transport anyone to anywhere, anywhen, in any reality, in the blink of an eye with zero power consumption. They form a Time Corps whose mandate it is to police the various timelines and fix any damage done by rogue time travelers, while at the same time identifying and recruiting likely agents from among those timelines. The plot of The Cat Who Walks Through Walls involves a running battle with exactly such a force; at stake is the "rescue" of an Artificial Intelligence capable of perfectly predicting the outcome of time manipulations.
- In J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Hermione mentions in passing that she and Harry are breaking wizard law by meddling with time. The Ministry doesn't appear to have any way to actually enforce this, however, and they seem to assume that Time-Turners simply won't fall into the wrong hands. The Ministry does keep them locked up in the Department of Mysteries. Rowling makes a point of having them all broken in book 5 so readers wouldn't assume time travel figures into the last two books.
- In the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, this was the mission of the Campaign for Real Time.
- Joel Suzuki: Dance of the Darkeye has the Intergalactic and Interdimensional Regulatory Control Agency (IIRCA), an organization dedicated to enforcing laws and preventing any sort of time travel or timeline hopping that might threaten existence. It has a reputation for being bureaucratic and inefficient, but it's also the strongest military force in existence. The organization consists of members of countless species from different planets, who use translator pods to speak to each other.
- The Time Purists in The Missing (Haddix) series basically "try to keep the timeline running correctly".
- In a short story prequel to the Morgaine Cycle, it's revealed that the precursors had Time Police whose job was to make sure that their Cool Gates weren't used to make large changes to the past. They did this not to preserve some "true timeline", but because if the past was changed too much it would lead to a truly catastrophic Time Crash. The Time Police eventually fail at their job, and the resulting Time Crash wipes out the precursors' galaxy-spanning civilization.
- The so-called 'Time Police' in Perry Rhodan's Magellan arc could be considered a mild subversion; rather than travel through time themselves, they just launched devastating attacks against any civilizations 'guilty' of using time machines in the present. Earth also once featured an (automated) alien installation that prevented time machines there from traveling back significantly beyond about 50,000 BC as part of a scheme to conceal said aliens' presence another one hundred and fifty thousand years earlier.
- In Relativity, when the time-traveller Phanthro first appears, he is mistaken for a time cop.
Phanthro: Oh, heavens no. You think I'm one of those people who want to stop someone from altering the past so the future stays intact? Sorry, that's the stuff TV shows are made of. Time is fluid. It's changing all the time. It would be impossible for anyone to govern such a thing.
- Ron Goulart's The Robot in the Closet and The Enormous Hourglass have a Time Travel Overseeing Commission. The Enormous Hourglass also has temporal Private Detective Sam Brimmer and his robot sidekick Tempo.
- Fredric Brown wrote three "The Short Happy Lives of Eustace Weaver" short stories about a man who invents a time machine and uses it to steal money from a bank with a time lock. In the first two, misunderstandings about the nature of time trip him up. In the third, Time Police arrive and execute him on the spot.
- When The Stainless Steel Rat suggests getting rid of a troublesome race of aliens by sending them forwards in time (to when the human race will be prepared for them) a member of the previously unknown Temporal Police materialises out of thin air and tells him it's forbidden. This situation is analogous to the previous suggestion of sending the fleet to a parallel universe, blocked by the newly-introduced Moral Corps, whose authority supersedes even Inskipp, the director of the Special Corps. Their reasoning (perfectly valid) is that they have no right to dump the problem on humans in another universe. Unfortunately, the massive power requirements for transporting an alien armada to another reality limits the choice to only several "nearby" universes, all but one of which contain human life. In the remaining universe, humans have long ago subjugated the aliens but do not desire any more of them. The Temporal agent does drop a hint on how to resolve the situation, however.
- While no actual Time Police show up during the Star Trek Expanded Universe novel Star Trek: Federation, the Temporal Prime Directive (see Live-Action TV, below) is in full force, requiring Kirk to have the viewscreen blurred to avoid a paradox when a Negative Space Wedgie causes them to meet the Enterprise-D.
- The titular organisation in the Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations novels also counts, though they don't have any reliable method of time travel and aren't supposed to, being the
Lawful Neutral type of time cops whose job is only to preserve history, not judge it. Because of these limitations, they mainly fill out the paperwork for temporal incidents and do their best to stop people from creating new ones. Many other temporal organisations, some from the Live-Action TV series and some not, make appearances. In general, contemporaneous organisations get along, even those from traditionally antagonistic governments, since they all have a shared interest in protecting themselves from temporal cataclysms. Organisations from future time periods, by contrast, are treated with greater suspicion. It may seem strange that the DTI would trust the Romulan time cops from their century more than the Federation's time cops from the future, but it makes more sense when one understands that the DTI does not — and legally cannot — know anything about their future colleagues' agendas except what they deign to tell them.
- Also the Time Patrol in A Tale of Time City by Diana Wynne Jones, although they play a very minor part in the story.
- The premise of This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar is that there are two competing sets of Time Police, the Agency and Garden, who are both trying to lead the timelines to end in their ultimate dominion and cut the other out of the universe. Red and Blue, two agents on opposite sides, work studiously to subtly influence history one way or the other, all while writing letters to each other and eventually falling in love.
- The Chronoguard in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next. Thursday is deeply surprised to hear that her infant son already has a sterling reputation— from the future. Unfortunately for the protagonists, the Chronoguard turns out to be terminally corrupt—barring a few honest holdouts. Thursday's son later reforms the force, only to discover that its use of time travelling technology have the effect of irrevocably destroying humanity's collective cognitive abilities, and wipes the entire thing from the timeline.
- In Cyril Kornbluth's short story "Time Bum", a con man tries to set up a sting by posing as a Time Policeman from the 25th century, and "accidentally" revealing himself as such to the mark. Unfortunately for him, the Time Police are real, and his would-be sting earns him the death penalty.
- In Vasily Golovachev's Time of Troubles series, in addition to the eldritch Clock Roaches the Chronosurgeons, their brainwashed human minions, the "Orderlies", also exist. Like their masters, the Orderlies do not have any particular goals of protecting the timeline, but they are militarized and interfere with any civilizations attempting time travel (or becoming witnesses of time travel, as well).
- The Time Patrol from a series of Poul Anderson's stories. Anderson doesn't shy away from giving them some Knight Templar tendencies either: In "The Only Game in Town", preserving the timeline that led to the creation of the Time Patrol means two patrolmen must alter the timeline and kill a Chinese expedition which, without the patrolmen's interference, would have brought word of the Americas back to Kublai Kahn.
- The time cops of Time Scout are the BATF. Generally, they just keep people from profiteering from time travel and prevent looting of historical treasures.
- Up the Line has the Time Patrol. There's considerable friction between the Patrol and Time Couriers (the group protagonist Jud belongs to).
- In Christopher Stasheff's Warlock of Gramarye books, the inventor of the time machine sets up an informal time police organization (GRIPE) after his technology is stolen by people trying to change the timeline to defeat democracy.
- "Wikihistory"
, by Desmond Warzel, is told as a Web forum of the International Association of Time Travelers. Much mention of punishing rookies for killing Hitler occurs.
