Take a photo of a barcode or cover
siskoid 's review for:
Time Patrol
by Poul Anderson
When I was a kid, I had a French collection of Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories, containing the first three (so only those from the 1950s). I thought I still had this volume, but can't find it now. No matter, I recently got the most recent collection, which contains all 9 short stories (though two of them are long enough to be slim novels), i.e. everything but The Shield of Time novel (which I might soon reread). All together like that in a 750+ page omnibus, a sameness tends to develop. That's because Anderson spends a LOT of time exploring the eras that have always interested him - the Late Antiquity/Dark Ages of the Vikings, Germanic peoples, and waning Roman Empire - though that's an artifact of two novellas taking place in that context (though perhaps the "hard SF" historical detail doesn't help. Still, Anderson's prose is more evocative than most of his SF contemporaries (Asimov, Heinlein, etc.) and his use of archaic words to make historical characters come alive is always interesting. While Manse Everard, hero of the first tale, is in every story, a couple of them make due with him in a supporting player role, and nothing against Mance, but these are perhaps among the best - The Sorrow of Odin the Goth, The Year of Ransom - along with the iconic Delenda Est, which I still remembered from my teenage reading. Is it me, or does Poul Anderson not get the same respect and attention some of the other seminal SF writers of the mid-20th Century get? For my money, the Time Patrol is as influential a piece of SF as I, Robot or Childhood's End, its DNA finding its way into many depictions of temporal and dimensional travel across media.