Wednesday 5 March 2014

Geological Epochs In Other Poul Anderson Time Travel Fiction II

The Jurassic, named after the Jura Mountains in the European Alps, is not an epoch but a period extending from over 200 million years ago to about 145 million years ago. The supercontinent Pangaea split into northern Laurasia and southern Gondwana. (I first read of Pangaea in another work of fiction when Alan Moore's character Tom Strong, time traveling, fought a protean continent-spanning organism called "the Pangaean.") Dinosaurs dominated the land and birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs.

In Poul Anderson's "Wildcat," time travelers drilling for oil in the Jurassic must contend with plesiosaurs, brontosaurs and tyrannosaurs and must then colonize Jurassic Earth because time travelers to the future have discovered that there will be a nuclear war in the twentieth century.

In "The Nest," a settlement of time traveling brigands lasts for mere decades during the ten million plus year Oligocene epoch whereas, in the Time Patrol series, the Patrol maintains its Academy for half a million years in that epoch. The twelve year old protagonist of "The Little Monster" is accidentally projected into the Pliocene whereas the Time Patrol presents only a brief incident during the transition from the Miocene to the Pliocene. Both the Little Monster's adventures and the Patrol's Miocene-Pliocene base are located in Spain.

And I think that that exhausts geological epochs in Poul Anderson's fiction?

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