Poul Anderson's Time Patrol as a TV series

[Tom Kalbfus]

I recently read Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, and it seems its broken up into episodes that would very well be suitable for a TV series, there is even some alternate history in it. Time travel often leads to that. Basically its the job of the Time Patrol to prevent Alternate History from occuring. You see besides them there are various time tourists and renegades who wish to change history for their own purposes, and its the job of the Time Patrol to fix history. The whole operation is run by the Danellians, they are the decendants of humanity that live in the extreme future, who showed up and laid out the rules of time travel when it was first invented in 19352 AD, the Danellians come from the year 500,000 AD and beyond. Episodes typically occur in the historic past and sometimes in the prehistoric past, but most involve fixing history or preventing history from being broken. Generally speaking, a change in history affects everyone futureward of the change, while people residing in the past including people originating in the future are unaffected by the change. In one episode Some meddler affected history so that Hannible destroyed Rome, and the Celts ended up colonizing North America in a very altered version of New York City, the Time Patrol had to go back and fix it to set history right again.

So what do you think of the idea?

[Andrew Hudson]

Seems like a good idea. Murray Leinster's Time Tunnel went down well and the series Sliders was popular

[Tom Kalbfus]

Seems like a good idea. Murray Leinster's Time Tunnel went down well and the series Sliders was popular
All except Dr. Who seem relatively short lived, and Dr. Who seems the cheeziest of the time travel series. The Time Patrol uses Time Cycles, Sort of like HG Wells Time Machine except they can hover and fly around and also move instantaneously from one point in space time to another. For real long distances in time, a heavier Time Shuttle is employed, but generally for anything Historic, the Time Cycle suffices. Each Time Cycle is a two seater, and it has a global GPS Chronometer positioning system, that tells the occupant exactly where and when he's at. The Time Patrol basically polices the timeline, there are other civilian time travelers, and generally they go to places and times where they can't do too much damage to the Timeline. A few renegade groups have stolen timecycles, and they seek to alter the timeline for their own purposes, and sometimes errors just build up in the timeline caused by simply "Butterflies", basically a time traveler simply visits the past and does nothing conscious to alter the timeline, but his mere presence alters the timeline, other timelines get altered by a bit of dogoodism, in one instance a Time Patrol officer was investigating a growing pagan religion, and was trying to track down the departure date and the person who caused it, and she saw a German Barbarian girl being raped by a Roman Soldier, so she flew down to rescue her, killing a bunch of Roman Soldiers, and she was mistaken for a war Goddess, and thus was the cause of the historical change, which she then spent trying to fix the timeline.

In another story, a time agent was observing a tribe of Goths, and he got a little too close emotionally to his subjects, so he began helping them out, and he would mysteriously dissappear and reappear in their lives, and he was mistaken for the God Odin, he had some children with one of the local women and he watched over his descendents from generation to generation, watching them die one by one, while to them, he appeared ageless, which reinforced their belief that he was the God Odin, well he had to help out the Bad guys so history would resume its proper course and that meant seeing to it that two of his three great grandsons would die in battle as the historic records foretold

In one story the Timeline did get changed, a Time Agent returned to New York City circa 1960, from a prehistoric vacation, and it was an entirely different timeline, the city was inhabited by Baal-worshipping Celts, so he had to go back in time to help the Romans defeat Hannable so the original timeline could be restored, he brought a refugee from the other timeline back in time with him, and she was resettled in the future with his friend from the planet Venus.