Harvest of Stars

An anthology of the classic short tales of the Time Patrol, the future organization that insures the continuity of human history. Forget minor hazards like nuclear bombs. The discovery of time travel means that everything we know, anyone we know, might not only vanish, but never even have existed. Against that possibility stand the men and women of the Time Patrol, dedicated to preserving the history they know and protecting the future from fanatics, terrorists, and would-be dictators who would remold the shape of reality to suit their own purposes. But Manse Everard, the Patrol's finest temporal trouble-shooter, bears a heavy burden. The fabric of history is stained with human blood and suffering which he cannot, must not do anything to alleviate, lest his tampering bring disastrous alterations in future time. Everard must leave the horrors of the past in place, lest his tampering or that of the Patrol's opponents, the Exaltationists, erase all hope of a better future, and instead bring about a future filled with greater horrors than any recorded by past history at its darkest and most foul.
Contents:
* Time Patrol [Time Patrol • 1] (1955) / novelette by Poul Anderson: 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
* Brave to Be a King [Time Patrol • 2] (1959) •/ novelette by Poul Anderson: 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.
* Gibraltar Falls [Time Patrol • 3] (1975) / short story by Poul Anderson: 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
* The Only Game in Town [Time Patrol • 4] (1960)/ novelette by Poul Anderson: Manse and a friend manage to head off the Chinese colonization, pre-Columbus, of the Americas.
8 Delenda Est [Time Patrol • 5] (1955) / novelette by Poul Anderson: 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 [Time Patrol • 6] (1983) / novella by Poul Anderson: Tells 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. Pummairam, a youth who takes Manse under his wing when first the patrolman arrives in Tyre, engineers much of the tricksterism Manse must use to thwart the baddies.
* The Sorrow of Odin the Goth [Time Patrol • 7] (1983) / novella by Poul Anderson: 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 [Time Patrol • 8] (1991) / novella by Poul An...

HARD TIMES That's what leads Manson Everard to answer an ad offering "high pay and foreign travel for men and women with military experience." But compared to where - and when - he's going, "hard times" in the 20th-century U.S.A. are easy!

9 • Time Patrol • [Time Patrol • 1] • (1955) • novelette by Poul Anderson
65 • Brave to Be a King • [Time Patrol • 2] • (1959) • novelette by Poul Anderson
125 • Gibraltar Falls • [Time Patrol • 3] • (1975) • shortstory by Poul Anderson
141 • The Only Game in Town • [Time Patrol • 4] • (1960) • novelette by Poul Anderson
187 • Delenda Est • [Time Patrol • 5] • (1955) • novelette by Poul Anderson

A power struggle for time itself.

The corridors of time connect the ages to each other. Through them, one can travel backwards and forwards over the history of man. But rival factions have waged war for centuries.... Malcolm is an ordinary man of today, caught up in a time war beyond his comprehension....

Cover Illustration by Anthony Roberts.

A fascinating 'what if novel, Brainwave is an exploration into the ways human society is organized and the assumptions that are made about how life is valued. It is also a novel about equality and what happens when the hierarchical structures by which we arrange our daily lives disappear.

The epic voyage of the spacecraft Leonora Christine will take her and her fifty-strong crew to a planet some thirty light-years distant. But, because the ship will accelerate to close to the speed of light, for those on board subjective time will slow and the journey will be of only a few years' duration.

Then a buffeting by an interstellar dustcloud changes everything. The ship's deceleration system is damaged irreperably and soon she is gaining velocity. When she attains light-speed, tau zero itself, the disparity between ship-time and external time becomes almost impossibly great. Eons and galaxies hurtle by, and the crew of the Leonora Christine speeds into the unknown.

In the year of grace 1345, as Sir Roger Baron de Tourneville is gathering an army to join King Edward III in the war against France, a most astonishing event occurs: a huge silver ship descends through the sky and lands in a pasture beside the little village of Ansby in northeastern Lincolnshire. The Wersgorix, whose scouting ship it is, are quite expert at taking over planets, and having determined from orbit that this one was suitable, they initiate standard world-conquering procedure. Ah, but this time it's no mere primitives the Wersgorix seek to enslave; they've launched their invasion against free Englishmen! In the end, only one alien is left alive; and Sir Roger's grand vision is born. He intends for the creature to fly the ship first to France to aid his King, then on to the Holy Land to vanquish the infidel. Unfortunately, he has not allowed for the treachery of the alien pilot, who instead takes the craft to his home planet, where, he thinks, these upstart barbarians will have no choice but to surrender. But that knavish alien little understands the indomitable will and clever resourcefulness of Englishmen, no matter how great the odds against them. . .

Rupert, prince of the Rhine, escapes from his captives, the Roundheads, in a science fiction work that casts Shakespeare as an historian