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The Shield of Time | Rating | |
| D | |||
| Poul Anderson | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| N/A | N/A | ||
Way, way in the future man finally invents time travel. They also invented the Time Patrol to make sure history doesn't get screwed up by everyone going back in time. In general, the Patrol has two branches: agents who make sure history unfolds as recorded, and scientists who do the recording of natural and human history so the agents know what "correct" is. Manse Everard is an Unattached Agent, meaning he is not tied down to any one particular time period. Wanda Tamberly is a scientist. The book chronicles some of their missions through time.
The novel is technically not a standalone story. Anderson has written several short stories involving Manse, published in various magazines, and the book makes frequent mention of them. It sort of has to, as it was in one of those stories that Manse and Wanda met. But reading them is not crucial to reading the book, though it probably would have helped. Anderson is careful to relate whatever information is needed, so I never felt left out.
The story is split into six sections, though it really is only three stories. In the first, Manse must find and apprehend the last of the "Exhaltationists," a band of far-future timewreckers hoping to remake history to their liking. The second concerns Wanda as she tries to minimize a clash of cultures in prehistoric Alaska when one immigration wave out of Siberia meets up with the protohumans already there. And in the third, they must team up together, along with some others from the Patrol, to correct history when it actually does go awry, resulting in alternate futures.
With plots like these, one might think I'd really enjoy the book. But I didn't. The action is very slow, very deliberate. The fieldwork in part one is a matter of manuever and countermanuever - espionage, essentially, and not the exciting James Bond type despite the possibilities that time travel allowed. Thanks to the Patrols insistence on avoiding paradoxes, they don't use those capabilities to their fullest potential, and the bad guys don't either for reasons that were never adequately explained. And in part two, I really was cheering for the agent who was telling Wanda she can't get involved. She's supposed to be smarter than that, but she steps in - multiple times! - in order to get her favorite tribe some leeway. And the third section makes the dreadful mistake of going into long sections of comparative history. This is interesting for a little bit, but when it happens several times in order to highlight differences in several different aspects, and then does this for two alternate histories, it gets more than a bit wearying.
These are not minor problems, and they are not the only ones. Throughout the entire book some things are repeated. And I don't mean only a few times, I mean constantly, every few pages it seemed. Certain lines are especially overdone: how the Patrol operates; what its mission is; the consequences of interference; and, during those comparative history expositions in part three, the sentiment, "such and such will happen if this alternate time doesn't change things by that point in the future," is repeated literally a dozen times in as many pages.
Put that all together, add in more than a few, "As you know, Bob," type conversations, and a fairly promising story becomes a chore to wade through. I suppose a major fan of time travel plots might enjoy this, and equally major fans of Poul Anderson. But I enjoy stories, not authors, and this one was just too much effort to read for too little return in entertainment.
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