"The Sorrows of Odin the Goth"is a classic of science fiction. The other stories vary and can get a bit cringe worthy at times given pulp-era norms (Manse "being kind" to an ancient prostitute he considered ugly). But this is still formative work. Anderson is so crafty that you can easily miss the fact that the Time Patrol itself is cause of almost every crisis it resolves! ( )

In terms of genre, the stories in this collection relate to that staple of Science Fiction, Time Travel and all the stories involve one Manse Everard, usually in a major role, but occasionally just as a walk on role.
There are nine stories within this collection, including at least one that has been published separately as a novella. This collection as a was published 1991. The stories themselves are

1 Time Patrol – 1955
2 Brave to be a King – 1959
3 Gibraltar Falls – 1975
4 The Only Game in Town – 1960
5 Delenda Est – 1955
6 Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks – 1983
7 The Sorrow of Odin the Goth – 1983
8 Star of the Sea – 1991
9 The Year of the Ransom – 1988

The first story, ‘Time Patrol’ introduces us to a Manse Everard who has yet to hear of the Time Patrol. From the story, it looks like it’s set pretty soon after the Second World War and Poul Anderson sounds as if he’s anticipating a period of depression as America stops spending money on fighting the Axis, not foreseeing the developing Cold War with the Soviet Union. Everard himself is an engineer with an impressive combat record and he’s looking for a new job in the small ads of the papers. When he finds one adverting just the bare minimum of information to pique his interest he goes for an interview. There’s quite a bit of banter between Everard and his interviewer who went by the name of Mr Gordon, though Everard doubts that’s actually his name. Everard soon finds himself back in the far distant past along with people from all eras of humanity but it’s Charles Whitcomb from the rather grim England of 1947 with whom he finds most in common and after graduation, on his return to 1950s America, it’s Whitcomb he contacts when he finds something fishy in the newspaper article about the excavation of an ancient barrow in Southeast England. This involves a trip to both Victorian London and to Jutish Essex. For the only time in these stories, we get to meet a literary character, a certain Great Detective, though due to copyright concerns he wasn’t actually named… With this being the first story in the series it’s likely Anderson wasn’t sure of some of the elements that would form the backbone of the rest of the stories, particularly how important the near godlike Danellians would be- this is the only story we meet them in, and they are suitably godlike. It’s probably the most light-hearted of the stories in my opinion. I really like this story due to the way Everard found his job in the small ads – so always keep an eye on them

After the events of the earlier story, Manse has been promoted to the rank of Unattached Patrolman, basically making him a transtemporal trouble-shooter, allowed, nay encouraged, to use his own judgement to solve the problems inherent in travellers going rogue in the past. But in ‘Brave to be a King’, when Cynthia Denison turned up at his twentieth century New York apartment, his skills will be put to a severe test. Cynthia was an old flame but had ended up marrying Keith Denison, another member of the Patrol, though in his case, he was an investigator, living in ancient Iran studying the past that the Patrol was set up to protect. This time Manse is operating largely on his own. The era in which Denison had gone missing was a turbulent one (so what else is new?), when the Persians were getting restive under the rule of their Median overlords, and it was the reason for Denison’s visit. Manse came to that time period about sixteen years after the revolution that overturned the empire hoping to find rumours about what had happened to his old friend. Acting as the Greek traveller Meander, Manse attaches himself to the court of the exiled King Croesus where he can learn the history of the previous few decades without attracting too much attention. It’s here that Manse learns of the near miraculous beginnings of Cyrus’s rein but nothing of a stranger sixteen years ago, but Croesus says he’d ask around at court for Meander. Surely the arrival of a patrol ‘requesting’ Meander’s presence to meet the grand vizier of the empire who wants to know why Manse is looking for this traveller is purely coincidental? No! And it is clear to Manse there’s something deeper going on here. All is made clearer when the King arrives in his full pomp and instantly recognisable despite sixteen years of hard campaigning since Manse had last seen Keith… Over the rest of the story, Manse and Keith work out ways of getting Keith out of his situation with minimal damage to the timeline, though Keith does wonder whether he really wanted to return to his original time any longer every so often. They eventually work out a plan where they’d go back to the very beginnings of the Cyrus mysteries and stop the murder of a baby. But how well will Keith adapt back to life in the twentieth century? And can he still love Cynthia after his Persian wives? But that’s where this story ends.

The next story, ‘Gibraltar Falls’ is a particularly provocative title for a Brit but it relates to the collapse of the barrier between what would become the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean. This story is unusual in this collection in that Manse Everard is barely present, the tale being told largely from the point of view of Tom Nomura and Feliz a Rach, the former effectively being a contemporary of Everard, whilst the latter was a citizen of a matriarchy from her companion’s far future. Feliz wasn’t a scientist doing scientific research but an artist taking recordings of the event, and a risk taker, which is where the meat of the story occurs when she gets a touch too close to the scene and is caught up in the maelstrom. Tom is more than a little in love with the artist and does the forbidden, looping back in time time-after-time until he found a way to pluck her from catastrophe. Of course, this is completely contrary to Patrol policy, but the Patrol has a certain latitude and Manse Everard, as an Unattached agent, has immense power and suggested a solution. Although short, it’s a fairly lyrical piece, especially for these time travel stories.

‘The Only Game in Town’ rather subverts the main theme of the Time Patrol. Its mission has always been presented as making sure that the timeline is maintained, but in this tale, John Sandoval has been tasked with an intervention in 13th century America and wants Manse to tag along. Only this time there’s no evidence of temporal interference.
While undertaking his studies of the First Nations tribes up near Crater Lake, Sandoval found himself facing a Mongol Horde. He’s had the Patrol investigate and they couldn’t find any records of the expedition being more than a legitimate exploration party. It’s not even that surprising there were no records from a certain Venetian explorer who was visiting China around the same time, after all the expedition is a long way from home and accidents happen… Manse is still wondering why he was being asked to get involved when Sandoval informs him that this isn’t a spy mission, but one that’s intended to arrange that accident that stopped them getting home, and the instructions came straight from the Danellian headquarters, so no arguing about them!
Both Sandoval and Manse reckon this is going to be an easy mission. After all, these are unsophisticated people, only a couple of generations away from having the same sort of nomadic lifestyle as the native tribes they were passing through. But the patrolmen had miscalculated and quickly find themselves prisoners of the Mongols, and Sandoval suffering a bad head injury. Manse manages to turn the tables on his captors and makes a break for it, knowing he can get away with bending the temporal rules to rescue Sandoval.
The tone of this story is a bit more cynical than usual for these tales, particularly for ones written at this period in Anderson’s life. and is more action orientated than usual, as well.

‘Delenda Est’ is a fairly unusual story as far as these time patrol stories are concerned. It isn’t strictly based on time travel but is a changed history story. Manse and his colleague Piet Van Sarawak (Dutch Indonesian-Venusian from the 24th century, and henceforward known as Sarawak) have got bored with the hunting available in the Pleistocene, I know, shocking isn’t it, and decide New York 1960 would be sufficiently decadent. So the pair arrange to transfer to an unsuspecting New York. Only, when their hopper passed through time to its programmed time and location, the two men are stunned to find themselves on an open street rather than a hidden warehouse. The locals are equally surprised. Almost as surprised, rather, for they act quicker and quickly subdue the patrolmen even as they begin to act. When they recover, the two patrolmen find themselves in jail and when Manse and Sarawak go through the standard list of languages, they find that the Germanic languages have the closest recognition rates, though are still incomprehensible. The usual go-to lingua-franca, Latin, was not recognised at all by the local police, and when a language specialist was called in, she was able to find her store of ancient Greek the most understandable. Manse Tried playing the Gods from Outer Space routine here but these people may not have much more than an empirical knowledge of science (steam cars were a thing, but not petrol driven vehicles). But they aren’t the ignorant savages their Celtic roots would have someone of our background thinking of them as, plus they’d been in a series of wars that had produced a degree of desperation in their leaders to find a way of returning to the top spot. While Sarawak and Manse are working on their captors, the house where they are being held is raided by one of the powers their current hosts are fighting against and the two patrolmen find themselves exchanging captors, though this time they are joined by their translator. These captors aren’t quite as careful of their new acquisitions and the patrolmen managed to escape, though they still had their translator with them – she was very beautiful! And useful in identifying the breakpoint between the two histories. After that, it’s just (hah!!) a matter of putting together a squad to put everything back onto the correct track. And what to do with Deidre Translator; hint: Manse doesn’t get the girl yet again – a bit of a running theme. This story was one of my favourites, and whilst still fun, the story has become a bit worn, though hopefully it’ll improve again after a rest

In ‘Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks’, the story opens with Manse Everard sailing into the port of Tyre (now in the modern country of Lebanon), during the reign of King Hiram in answer to the call for help from the Patrol agents in place in this important ancient crossroads (though not as important, or well supported as Jerusalem a few centuries later and a few miles South). Apparently, a group of criminals from the far future agree with the agents in place and it’s as he’s approaching the house of the agents, along with his local guide who provides a lot of the fun in the story, that we have the first interaction between the criminals and the Patrol when a blind beggar proves not to be blind, a beggar, or, indeed, a local, as he shoots Manse with a sonic stunner. Manse would have been jelly if his guide hadn't proven to be adept with his sling. As Manse recovers in the house of Zakarbaal, in reality the patrol agent Chaim Zorach, and his wife Yael, Chaim and Yael fill him in on why they and, clearly, the criminal gang, believed Tyre to be such an important target – this was reasonably interesting though rather a filler to the main story. The main story becomes a detective story as Manse has to find anyone who had memories of strangers passing through Usu, the former capital, a generation earlier. He is aided by his guide Pummairam, who decided that Manse was someone worth being around and it’s the youngster who provides the access to the servants that gives Manse his break. Pum is a great character and allows Anderson to show his belief that ignorant isn’t stupid. There’s a bit of the-current history mentioned in the use of Chaim and Yael that might not be such an issue now but overall, it’s a delightful tale.

Next up is ‘The Sorrow of Odin the Goth’, which sees us travelling back to the disturbed times of the Hunnish invaders as they push the Goths in towards the Roman borders. It also covers the introduction of Christianity to the Goths. But the main story is told from the point of view of Carl who Is investigating the tales of the Germanic eddas and their version of Odin, which involves him in meeting with the various Gothic tribes and while it wasn’t entirely coincidence that Carl looked like the popular view of Odin, he hadn't really thought through what effect this would have on the locals or himself. Carl finds himself attracted to the daughter of a local chief to the extent that they are married, and they set up home together, no doubt aided by his apparently mystical background and the gifts he’d lavished on the family. Unlike the earlier stories, this tale is set along a series of dates through a near century of the continuous timeline experienced by the gothic tribe he was following. Manse Everard doesn’t really get a look in during this story, just appearing every now and then to force Carl through various crises of conscious when the realisation of what he’d got himself, and his descendants, into during those turbulent times overwhelms him, and in ensuring that the timeline doesn’t get too tangled. When I first read this, I wasn’t too enthusiastic about this story, mainly because of the way Carl jumped around in the timelines – including a few jumps to the 1930s where Carl and Laurie, his wife, had set up home (both are later twentieth century born). This time through I quite enjoyed it, though Anderson’s inclusion of the comments about the corporatisation of the latter half of twentieth century American culture, and his (apparent) blaming of this on the Democrats rings rather hollowly these days.

The next story, ‘Star of the Sea’, is also set on the borders of the Roman Empire, though more than three hundred years before and on the North European borders in Germany and the Low Countries, as these borders were being formalised. For the first time in Manse’s career (that we’ve been allowed to see), his official partner is a female agent. Janne Floris like Carl from our previous review, is a cultural investigator, though working more directly with the tribes and legions interacting along the northern borders. This time, the team’s concern isn’t any obvious threat to the timeline, just a couple of versions of Tacitus’s histories. This part is handled quite nicely in my opinion; we have Everard discussing Tacitus’s histories and why they are important to history, then passing the infodump off as an explanation of basic Patrol process to one of those whose job was to do the data collection. Anyway, a research team working a couple of hundred years after Janne’s era wanted to get Tacitus’s take on their era of study, so they raided a local private library to copy that only to find out that it had a major difference to the patrol reference copy. Instead of the Batavi rebellion giving the Romans a scare, but ultimate petering out, it was more successful to start with, but more violently eliminated in the end, with key change being the seeress Veleda, suing for peace in Tacitus 1, and for war in Tacitus 2. Manse spends quite a while in this tale grouching about intrusive government but once he gets over that he and Janne travel back to the 30 ADs to investigate which version of Tacitus is correct, and make sure it’s Tacitus 1 ! We get a bit of an introduction to the principal characters from the Germanic tribe side of this adventure, Wael-Edh and her companion Heidhim as they discuss their way forward and it’s the man who’s pushing for more violence. As Manse and Janne start interacting with these characters they find themselves travelling further North, and deeper into the past until they came to the source of the disruption. In between we get to see some of the brutality Anderson imagines both sides inflicted on each other during this conflict. When the two patrol members find their way back to Heidhim and Wael-Edh’s earliest days, they’re in the Danish islands, where they’re forced to watch Wael-Edh’s first meeting with Romans, and it wasn’t pleasant and Janne, being less used to the messy reality than Manse, used the technology on her time scooter to destroy the marauding sailors and the young Edh took her as the vengeful aspect of her goddess, and her companion swears eternal vengeance on the Romans. In order to mitigate the effects this has on the couple, Janne and Manse travel back to the Wael-Edh who was having doubts about what she was doing. Her companion did not want to make peace, though, even though she did by this point and killed himself rather than break oath. Again, Manse doesn’t get to be more than a temporary companion to his lady friend. I have to say this was the hardest story to get through, though this could have been because it was so thematically similar to the previous story.

In ‘The Year of the Ransom’ we open on the Galapagos islands where we see the actions from the first-person point of view of Wanda Tamberly, who’s a guide on the islands and has no idea of the Time Patrol, or the possibilities of time travel, until a stranger appears atop a machine hanging in mid-air, demanding to know if she’s Wanda Tamberly. Almost without thought, she admits that she is, and finds herself swept off into a fantastical adventure. We then cut back to the early fifteen hundreds and the treasury holding the ransom for the Inca where a further delivery is being overseen by Luis Ildefonso Castelar y Moreno (hereafter known as Castelar both in the story, and here ) and Fray Esteban Tanaquil, Franciscan Friar, otherwise known as Stephen Tamberly of the Time Patrol. Castelar was just being curious but, under the guise of ‘deheathenising’ the ransom, Tamberly is making records of these treasures lost to history when the Spanish melted the loot down for ease of transport. Both get taken by surprised by an incursion into the vault from a more aggressive set of time travellers who take both men away with them as they made their escape. It became clear that Fra Tanaquil wasn’t what he said he was, and they turned all their attention on him, not thinking Castelar a threat. Oh boy, were they wrong – far future supermen fell to enraged conquistador and those who could fled the scene, leaving Castelar in charge of an abandoned time cycle – Tamberly is too ill from his interrogation to do much more than go along with Castelar and show him how it worked before being abandoned in turn as Castelar goes off in search of glory, both for himself and the Spanish crown! His first stop is to pick up Wanda to get her to show him her wonderful world. Given this was Wanda’s first contact with time travel as well, she keeps her head reasonably well though, to fair, she’s already been contacted by Manse as he searched for the missing Tamberly. Together, late twentieth century girl and grizzled time agent manage to overcome the displaced Castelar. But what about Uncle Stephen? Well, lost in time by Castelar, who knows where, he’s pretty much been abandoned, but he’s taken his own steps to being recovered! And this time Manse gets the girl as well!

Overall, this is a great collection of stories and gives you a good selection of Poul Anderson’s style and I like most of them, especially the first one with the way Manse gets recruited. In my opinion, the two Roman stories are the most boring, though ‘The Sorrow of Odin the Goth’ was rather more interesting this time through. ( )

This one's a collection of time travel tales featuring Manse Everard, agent of the Time Patrol. It's an unremarkable concept, but the stories stand out in that Mr. Anderson avoids all the temporal tourist traps: No Civil War. Nary a Nazi in sight. Manse does visit the Roman Empire, but it's out at the fringes of the Empire. All-in-all, a pleasant collection of tales.
--J. ( )

Collected herein are the nine stories -- one is of short-novel length and most of the rest are novelettes/novellas -- in Anderson's famous series; missing is the 1990 novel The Shield of Time, but this is already a very long book: 458 pages may not seem so much, but the pages are large and the type is small, and a lot of the prose is pretty soporific, lurching haphazardly between a sort of relentless drab utilitarianism, an affected cod-epic poesy, and a clumsy impressionism. I recall reading some of this material in the very much earlier (and shorter) collection Guardians of Time (1960), 'way 'way 'way back when, but, though I recall it being surprisingly dull -- for this reader at least, it's quite difficult to make a time-travel story dull -- I don't recall the writing being quite so rotten. Maybe part of the dullness is that, while Anderson gives us great slodges of political and military history, there's almost zero evocation of the various ages in which the stories are set. Since there's no real sensawunda either -- the time cops ride around on their sort-of-motorbikes in a very business-as-usual way -- and since it's difficult to care too much about the fates of characters who are, with very rare exceptions, little more than named cyphers . . . well, I kept glancing at the copy of Robert Cowley's The Collected What If? (2005) on my shelves and wondering if I'd have more fun reading that instead.

What of the stories themselves? "Time Patrol" (1955) is not much more than a sort of setter-upper for the series. In the mid-20th century Manse Everard answers a job ad and gets hired as a time cop. Time travel will be invented centuries in the future; untold centuries beyond that mankind has evolved into a species called the Danellians, who persuaded the early time travellers to set up the Time Patrol with the aim of protecting all of time from any alteration by interfering temponauts that might risk the Danellians' existence. Manse's first mission is to go back to the late 19th century to correct the circumstances that led to the appearance of an anachronistic item in an old burial mound; the case has baffled even Sherlock Holmes (unnamed, but clearly identified through description). It's easy to get the impression that Anderson's initial aim was to make Everard a sort of time-travelling Holmes -- he gives him the pipe to go with the role -- but changed his mind. As it is, all through the series of tales there are offhand references to matters Holmesian. Manse earns the right to be an Unattached Agent of the Patrol: rather than being limited to any particular era, he can roam the timeways at will and with a considerable degree of autonomy.

The second tale, "Brave to Be a King" (1959), is easily the best. A Time Patrol friend of Manse's, Keith, has gone missing in 6th-century Iran, and Keith's wife begs Manse to go find him. Trouble is, Manse has always had the serious hots for the wife, despite her somewhat whiny voice, so it's very tempting not to try very hard -- to assume that Keith has landed on his feet and is happy where he is, sort of thing. But his honourable self knows better. He discovers Keith has been forced to adopt the persona of Cyrus the Great; rescuing him while preserving the course of history proves to be a far more tortuous business than one might imagine. What makes this story so good is that two of the characters -- Keith and his 20th-century wife Cynthia -- are actual characters, and for once Anderson has sufficient understanding of them that, rather than make their reunion at story's end a joyous affair, he shows Keith having second thoughts and more about having given up a life of constant challenge and a wife who was a true companion (not to mention the harem of which she was a part) in order to spend the rest of his days in a cramped Manhattan apartment with ghastly decor and a wife with a whiny voice.

"Gibraltar Falls" (1975) is the shortest piece in the book, and the worst. Anderson wanted to show us what must have been the most remarkable spectacle of known prehistory, the collapse of the isthmus at the Gates of Hercules and the inundation of the basin that is now the Mediterranean Sea by the waters of the Atlantic, but didn't really bother constructing a story to go with it. In "The Only Game in Town" (1960) Manse and a friend manage to head off the Chinese colonization, pre-Columbus, of the Americas. In "Delenda Est" (1955), another fairly good entry, Manse and a friend return from a holiday in the Pleistocene to their own time, only to discover it considerably changed; clearly there's been an unauthorized change to history. Eventually they trace it to an incident during the Punic Wars, which incident made it possible for Hannibal to defeat Rome. They succeed in reversing the change, but know that in so doing they're wiping out all the people they've befriended in the alternative 1950s. They succeed, though, in saving the laughing-eyed Hoirish colleen whom Manse's friend has fallen for.

"Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks" (1983) is set in Tyre during the time of Solomon and Hiram and sees the introduction of the Exaltationists, the 23rd-century cult whose obsessive pursuit of hedonism renders them unimpressed by the effects their vicious power-and pleasure-seeking could do to the timestream, including the possibility of their wiping the existence of their own culture out of history. The story is held together by the character of Pummairam, a youth who takes Manse under his wing when first the patrolman arrives in Tyre, and who engineers much of the tricksterism Manse must use to thwart the baddies. In "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" (1983) Manse for once takes something of a back seat. Here a history prof, Carl Farness, has allowed himself to become the personification of the god Odin to a 4th-century tribe of Goths; he has also allowed himself to become far too personally involved with the people whom he's there to study, marrying one of them (with the knowledge of his 20th-century wife) and keeping an eye on the usually somewhat messy fates of his children, grandchildren, etc. Manse gets involved because incarnations of gods are the kind of thing that cause history to be altered; in fact, as Carl points out, all kinds of Goth tribes were convinced they'd been visited by various deities, and their stories were usually quickly dismissed as myths, then forgotten. Still, he must extract himself from the situation with care.

"Star of the Sea" is, I suppose, technically a short novel, but there have been plenty of stories published as full-length novels that have been shorter than this. (Certainly seemed so, anyway . . .) Europe in the 1st century, and various peoples, led by the likes of Civilis, are rebelling against corrupt Roman rule -- with the violence continuing even after it becomes clear that an honourable peace could be struck. A major factor keeping them at war is the zeal of a visionary/prophetess called Veleda, who for reasons unknown has had a far greater and longer influence in a revealed timeline than she had in the known history of the period. Manse and a historian called Floris, who becomes his first real love, manage to sort out the situation.

Finally, The Year of the Ransom (1988), published originally as a standalone illustrated volume, is a prequel to The Shield of Time, featuring, as well as Manse, that novel's heroine Wanda Tamberley. Here her Uncle Steve, living among Pizarro's brutal conquistadors at the time of the ransoming of Atahuallpa, is attacked by the Exaltationists and then abducted into a very distant past by a quick-witted Spanish soldier who believes him to be a demon. Manse and Wanda to the rescue, of course.

At an early moment in the story "Time Patrol" Anderson casually sideswipes the pretensions of Heinlein's "All You Zombies" and Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself: "You could not be your own mother, for instance, because of sheer genetics. If you went back and married your former father, the children would be different, none of them you, because each would have only half your chromosomes" (p7). And there are some moderately elegant avoidances of time-paradox issues:

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 could 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. It could get very messed up. No wonder the Patrol was fussy, even about small changes which would not affect the main pattern. (p38)

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 came near failing. Only the energy and genius of Lenin pulled it through. What if you traveled to the nineteenth century and quietly, harmlessly prevented Lenin's parents from ever meeting each other? Whatever else the Russian Empire later became, it would not be the Soviet Union, and the consequences of that would pervade all history afterward. You, pastward of the change, would still be there; but returning futureward, you'd find a totally different world, a world in which you yourself were probably never born. You'd exist, but as an effect without a cause, thrown up into existence by that anarchy which is at [time's:] foundation. (p420)

And some that are, er, less elegant:

Don't ask me why they weren't "always" wiped out; why this is the first time we came back from the far past to find a changed future. I don't understand the mutable-time paradoxes. We just did, that's all. (p113)

Among my favourite phrases were these:

Everard finished a night's sleep and a breakfast which Deirdre's eyes had made miserable by standing on deck as they came in to the private pier. ("Delenda Est")

The floor had been given a deep-blue covering that responded slightly to footfalls, like living muscles. (The Year of the Ransom)

An ongoing irritation with the text, aside from the problems I have with the writing style, as mentioned above, is a frequent palavering about the difficulty the English language, like all other ordinary languages, has with the tenses required to talk about events along timelines -- like those of era-hopping Time Patrollers -- that don't match the world's standard timeline. Often enough someone will interrupt their own narrative to bewail the difficulty they're having expressing past and future in English, and what a good thing it is that the Time Patrollers' own invented language, "Temporal", has extra tenses to deal with this sort of stuff. The trouble is, it's baloney: yes, occasionally writers of time-travel stories have to choose their words carefully, but it isn't a major problem, and in a milieu where time travel was common listeners would have even less difficulty understanding what was going on. And, just to cope with those rare cases where there might be difficulties of comprehension, people would soon enough invent ways of getting around them -- in effect, would introduce those new tenses to their native tongue. They wouldn't have to learn a whole new blasted language to deal with the problem. (Of course, there are other good reason why Time Patrollers from different cultures and eras should have a common language to use; my point is that the tenses problem isn't one of those reasons, yet Anderson is tiresomely insistent that it is.)

I'd initially planned to read The Shield of Time immediately after this book, but in the event I couldn't face it. I decided to have a break from Anderson for a while. My deadline for this essay is fast approaching, though, so I can't put off The Shield of Time too much longer. Gulp.
( )

A collection of novellas around the Time Patrol and specifically Manse. I enjoyed how the stories went to lesser known parts of history and the stories were compelling. Some of them were a bit long, but all of them enjoyable. ( )