Time Patrol
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Time Patrol is a series of works, mostly short stories, by Poul Anderson. They take place in a universe where the resolution to the Grandfather Paradox is that you now exist without ever having had a father, and the Time Police relentlessly works to keep time nevertheless on the same path -- while ruthlessly expurgating futures, filled with living beings, that do not conform to it. Doing this often requires the sacrifice of time travelers or those they love.
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The following tropes are common to many or all entries in the Time Patrol franchise.
For tropes specific to individual installments, visit their respective work pages.
For tropes specific to individual installments, visit their respective work pages.
- Ancient Astronauts: Except with time travelers.
- The Atoner: Harpagus in "Brave To Be A King"
- Bittersweet Ending: Typically.
- Briar Patching: Manse warns the Mongols that the distilled liquors are too strong for them.
- The Chosen One: Invoked in "Brave To Be A King" to restore history
- Dreaming of Things to Come: In "Brave To Be King" used to explain an infanticide
- Light Is Good: Invoked in the Persian setting of "Brave To Be A King"
- Moses in the Bulrushes: in "Brave To Be A King" twisted
- Ontological Inertia: Temporal inertia makes it hard to change the past -- including changing it back.
- Time Machine: The members of the Patrol use vehicles ranging from one- or two-person motorcycle-like "time scooters" to larger, multi-passenger time transports.
- Time Travel
- Time Travel Tense Trouble: Averted by inventing a language, Temporal, with more tenses.
- Timey-Wimey Ball: All the changes...
- Tricked-Out Time: Features such wonders and abuse of the self-consistency principle that when a man sees his lover falling off a cliff, he turns his head, so that he doesn't see her hit bottom and can come back and rescue her later.
- Will Not Tell a Lie: Persians in "Brave To Be A King"
- You Will Be Beethoven: Or Cyrus the Great. Or Odin.