Time Patrol

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 have 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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Tropes used in Time Patrol include:

• 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.