The End of Eternity

David

Rating: really liked it
I've always felt that Isaac Asimov writes brilliant science fiction with boring characters. I love a good time travel story, mostly to see what this author's take on the usual time travel paradoxes will be. Anyone who writes about agents changing history has to explain how they deal with things like the Grandfather Paradox, meeting earlier or later versions of yourself, and so on. There are a handful of well-known ways to deal with these issues (alternate timelines, a deterministic universe, special laws of temporal physics, etc.) and Asimov is rather inventive in using several of them at once.

Although The End of Eternity is brilliant in its construction of a civilization of time travelers and all the history and technology that goes into their society and the way they meddle with time, his protagonists are basically a bunch of whiny geeks who've never kissed a girl and act like highly-educated chimpanzees fighting for the highest branch in the treehouse. Asimov's vision of a civilization that spans millions of years and thousands of realities doesn't include a single one where women become scientists and engineers and might join the Eternals' boys' club. The entire plot hinges on not one but two high-ranking Eternals who decide they are willing to throw all of reality into danger for the chance to get laid. I know Asimov was a nerd and he wrote this in the 1950s, but he still could have done better. It's like the idea of women as anything but sex objects to be coveted or to seduce men off the path of Righteous Scientific Objectivity just never occurred to him. So naturally when a girl shows up (the only female character in the entire book), she must spell T-R-O-U-B-L-E, and in this case, the end of Eternity.

I enjoyed the story, but Asimov has never been my favorite among the Grand Old Masters of science fiction; there is something just a little too cold and calculating in all of his stories. For the ideas and the plot twists, this is a fun book with a great premise, but don't expect Asimov to wow you with his nuanced grasp of human relationships. His characters are wire dummies to hang a story on.

Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽

Rating: really liked it
Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:

Re-reading a favorite book from your teenage years is always a risky endeavor. I’ve been dismayed by how often my youthful memories are tarnished by a re-read, and I end up wondering if my taste as a young adult was all in my mouth.



But I couldn’t resist trying The End of Eternity (1955) by Isaac Asimov again, partly because I remembered liking it so well as a teenager, but my memories of it were so extremely hazy (for the longest time, until a Google search saved me, I couldn’t even remember the title of the book, it was just “that really cool Asimov time-traveling book” in my head). So I bought a used copy, got a few chuckles out of the 1970s sci-fi cover and how short novels used to be (192 pages here), and settled down to read.

Andrew Harlan is one of the so-called Eternals, men (almost invariably men) who have been pulled into kind of a bubble called “Eternity” that exists outside of normal time. Eternity, and a time-traveling machine called the “Kettle” that acts as a type of elevator through the years of the Earth’s existence, give them the ability to easily travel backwards and forwards in time. Eternals can change the past, present and future, which they frequently do when they think that society is taking a turn that leads to an undesirable outcome. Strangely, however, the Kettle is inexplicably blocked from stopping anywhere during the 70,000th to the 150,000th centuries, and afterwards lies only emptiness: Earth and its inhabitants are gone.

Love and marriage aren’t permitted for Eternals, other than brief sexual liaisons that are required to go through authorized channels. But Andrew, despite his best efforts to avoid it, manages to fall into a relationship, and then love, with a woman, Nöyes Lambert, who has been temporarily brought into Eternity. Soon he finds himself in the middle of not only his own small personal rebellion, but also a series of events that may affect Eternity and change the entire history of the Earth.

I’m vastly relieved to report that The End of Eternity has held up quite well over the decades. It’s certainly dated, and for a while I thought I was going to have some fairly serious issues with the secondary role of women in this novel, but that all actually resolved itself quite well in the end (though to explain why would spoil the tale).

The End of Eternity has the retro charm of 1950s science fiction, but with more depth than most sci-fi novels from that age. It has its weaknesses: Asimov’s scientific theory and technology for time travel are a little wild and woolly, female characters are non-existent other than Nöyes, and all of the characters except (to some extent) Andrew and Nöyes are strictly one-dimensional. If you can roll with it, however, it’s a fun and interesting ride, with a few twists and turns that definitely make the story memorable.

Initial review: I've been asking myself for ages, what was that time travel story of Isaac Asimov's that I loved when I was a teenager? and the question suddenly became more urgent after an interesting discussion I was having with some GR friends about time travel novels we've liked (see the thread to Joe Valdez's review of The Time Traveler's Wife). And it occurred to me to Google "Isaac Asimov time travel," duh, and there it was.

So the four stars here are based purely on my love for this book ages ago, and unfortunately I've found that my teenage taste in books is not always a reliable indicator of literary quality, so don't blame me if you read this and think it's a dud. I'd like to read it again, but I just checked and my local library doesn't have it on their shelves (maybe ILL? Will have to see sometime) so it'll probably be a while before I re-read this. But Uncle Isaac was a big reason for my teenage love for science fiction, which has lasted for my entire life. Just for that, he gets as many stars as I care to dish out. No apologies.

Manny

Rating: really liked it
If you haven't read Asimov's SF classic, it's one of those time-travel stories where you can change the past. The people with the time machines are a shadowy, infinitely powerful organisation called the Eternals. They flit around in time, changing things "for the good of humanity". Except that, as I'm sure you already guessed, it isn't quite clear after a while that humanity is benefiting from all this attention. The agents who are responsible for making the changes are called Technicians, and they pride themselves on always finding the very simplest way to effect the change. They don't start a war if it's enough just to assassinate one key person; they don't assassinate him if it's enough just to organise a traffic accident so that he misses a meeting; and they don't organise the traffic accident if it's enough just to put his address book in a different pocket, so that he makes the critical phone call twenty minutes too late. In a word, they're minimalists.

I was talking about this book the other day with an American friend who'd also read it. If the premise of the story really were true, we wondered what evidence you could find to suggest that Eternals had been at work. We couldn't help thinking that the 2000 Butterfly Ballot was suspicious. Not least the name - perhaps some Technician had been unable to resist the joke, and planted a larger clue than he really was supposed to?

__________________________________

After posting this review and that for The Naked Sun , I did some more googling on the background to Eternity. Among other things, I discovered that Asimov claimed he got the original idea when he saw an ad in an early 30s newspaper, showing a picture that looked rather like a mushroom cloud. Well, he thought to himself, no one in 1930 knew what a mushroom cloud looked like. Maybe it's a message from a stranded time-traveller? And, from that beginning, he constructed the rest of the novel.

I liked it, but I was dubious about the reliability of the method. Time travel probably won't be invented very soon - it sounds like extremely advanced technology. If you really did want to send a message into the distant future, you'd want something far more permanent and noticeable than an obscure ad. Something, in fact, that would have a decent chance of surviving for thousands of years, in unchanged form, and which would be as prominent as possible. The ideal thing would be an immortal work of art.

And then it struck me: in a different thread, we'd been talking about Shakespeare's mysterious Sonnet XVIII. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit to your august consideration the hypothesis that this is a message from a time-traveller who crashed their machine in the early 17th century. To start off with, the poem explicitly says that its central purpose is to be remembered for ever. It's so beautiful, and every word is so perfectly chosen, that it has a decent chance of surviving unchanged for thousands of years - maybe, even until people get around to inventing time travel?

If you want to turn this into a short story, please credit me somewhere :)

Bradley

Rating: really liked it
I just had to do a little retro SF catch-up, grabbing those old classics by big-name SF authors that I haven't yet had the pleasure to read, and this one kept cropping up as one of the best of the best by Asimov.

You know, OTHER than Foundation and the Robot novels. Of which, a few are sub-par. We'll ignore all of these for now and focus on this standalone.

About time travel in a kettle, kinda like Wells' time machine, only let's make a society of men, only men, living outside of time a-la Time Lords and have our MC be a pre-Doctor kind of character who's ACTUALLY willing to fall in love with a girl and is willing to DESTROY this little bubble of Eternity for her sake.

You know, because a society of nothing but men will obviously think with nothing more than the spout of their kettles.

And don't get me started on this 50's assumption that only men can do the work, but because even Asimov recognized all that and turned her into a femme fatale and made the girls more badass than the boys. So we learn. LATER. :) So let's move on from there.

This is basically Doctor Who on steroids and less buddy-buddy unique eras and a hardcore dive into escaping a whole society of time travelers who meddle with the past to erase the really bad stuff, fixing whole timelines on massive scales over vast time periods... ALL FOR THE SAKE OF TIPPING HIS TEAKETTLE.

Oh, and he decides it's okay to destroy all the Time Lords. Ahem. Sorry. Eternals.

What could have been a relatively average and not bad at all novel right HERE is then given the full Asimov twist and he turns it into a full adventure with deeper and deeper intrigue, reversals, surprises, reveals, and mystery. Not bad, Asimov. And then he even goes for the short-story twist at the end and makes us re-evaluate EVERYTHING that has happened before in a new light.

NOT BAD AT ALL.

So if you can get over the naming conventions and the cardboard cutout characters and the whole psychosexual mess, I can ABSOLUTELY PROMISE YOU that there's a very fine and fun novel in here. :) Worthy of anything we've got today and somewhat more ambitious, even with the length, than most of the same.

I'm very glad to have read this. :)

sologdin

Rating: really liked it
Nutshell: antisocial nerd, responsible for historical amendments to spacetime continuum, dicks it up for everyone in order to lose virginity.

Eternity is an interdimensional NGO, set up in the 27th century (32), initially to carry on intertemporal trade (43), which trade was promoted as its primary purpose. Its true primary task is to "prevent catastrophe from striking mankind" and "to breed out of Reality any factors that might lead to such knowledge" of its biotemporal management of human history (43-44).

We see that the main component of biotemporal management is actually wealth management for each century: "The Sociologists had an equation for the phenomenon" of uneven wealth distribution (45). Biotemporal managers allowed aristocracies to form, so long as they "did not entirely forget their responsibilities while enjoying their privileges" (46). Analogues to marxism here to the extent that the managers viewed the aristocracy as a ruling entity, "a class, not as individuals" (38). Generally, the point is to protect the species from destroying itself in nuclear war, but there's talk in the NGO of abolishing space travel, which always turns out to be a disaster.

Some odd gender politics: no women in the NGO, for the bizarre reason that removing females from the spacetime continuum actually has a more deleterious effect than removing males (something to do with the birthrate). Plenty of commentary, express and implied, on freedom & determinism. Strikes me that determinism is the default position when the premise of the story is that changes initiated by the managers at one point alter later effects. That said, some characters believe in "temporal inertia" (169), and that effects from changes return to a hypothetical baseline after a nunber of centuries, rather than creating further diremptions.

Anyway, lotsa paradoxes, including the central paradox of the novel (or, rather, of the Setting, rather than the Story): how is it that changes to history do not effect the NGO when the NGO interacts with and draws from history?

Nifty link toward the end to the Robot/Empire/Foundation setting: safe to say that the denouement is the condition of possibility for that narrative.

Recommended for those who stumble upon temporal field theory without being aware of its mathematical justification, persons for whom human appetites carry a quivery repulsion, and readers who associate the mushroom cloud with the system by which private capital was invested in business.

Ray

Rating: really liked it
In many ways, an absolute masterpiece of classic science fiction. Asimov's best stand-alone novel, which is kind of by default due to his other great work Foundation being a series and most of his other science fiction works to be short stories. (And yes, I know The End of Eternity in an indirect way does connect to Foundation.)

The time travel mechanics are mind-boggling in all the best ways. The concept of Eternity which manipulates time century by century, erasing entire realities by constantly making slight edits, is certainly fascinating. Even over sixty years later, the book mainly holds up extremely well and few contemporary works could compare to these brilliant concepts.

However, in a more social and literary sense, there is unfortunately a lot to criticize. Although the book imagines far off centuries thousands upon thousands of years in the future, it just can't get over the sexism of the 1950s era in which it was written. The main character, in a bit of a cliche, questions everything after he falls in love with a woman who will be erased if he doesn't fight the power in Eternity.

This specifically exposes the central problem of the narrative: how shocking it is for this imagined council of time lords to have any women around. Why is that? There are some throwaway lines about how female Eternals are rare because women are so important to the timelines they're from that they can't be taken out, and also the love interest character does turn out to be more important and powerful in the end. But come on, the real reason Eternity is such a sausage fest is because Asimov just couldn't get over the idea that only men can be super-scientists. And that just don't age well.

I'll still give this a full 5 star review because it is a classic and is a product of its time--even if as a time travel story the author could have tried harder to craft some more open-minded futurism.

Tom Quinn

Rating: really liked it
Check this: it's the trolley problem with time travel! Pencils ready? Eyes on your own work, please.

1) If you could throw a switch to save five strangers by squashing one, would you do it? (FYI, most people say yes)

2) If the one to squash was your own grandmother, would you still do it? (Think it through!)

3) What if it the squashee was your one true love? (Seeming like 1 > 5 somehow? What changed?)

4) What if (for some reason, don't overcomplicate things) what if saving your one true love meant sacrificing a million or two strangers? (Show your work.)

And finally 5) What if you could save your one true love by way of temporal distortion and it meant undoing the potential lives of 50 billion (with a B) future people? (Be honest!)


EXTRA CREDIT: The Bootstrap Paradox features prominently in this story. Which object (or person) serves the most significant "bootstrapping" role? Why?

~

Great sci-fi tackles thorny philosophical challenges with the trappings of technology, and this one asks a real corker:

As cold, indifferent logic brings us the means to learn more about what seems at times a cold, indifferent universe, where does humble Humankind factor in? In essence, what is it that makes us human? And how much is that worth?

2.5 stars. Undoubtedly a product of its time and demonstrating all the social sensitivity of a brick, the uptight 1950s presentation leaves much to be desired. Yet time travel stories are inherently cool so if you feel up to ignoring a heaping helping of "gee whiz, how's a man supposed to think with a curvy dame hanging around?"-brand misogyny, you'll see why this one's something of an icon within the genre. I still like Asimov's short stories much more than his novels, but this one's brief enough that it's over before his overwrought style wears thin.

Nandakishore Mridula

Rating: really liked it
This is a unique one for Asimov, and not connected to his usual fictional universe. Ironically, this is his first book I tried to read, in Malayalam translation, no less! But either the translation was bad, or the story was untranslatable, or I was too young for it... I dropped it after a few pages. I am glad I did, because I could read the original afresh.

This story is about a group called Eternals who travel outside of linear time, stepping in when required within the time-stream to make things "better for humanity". Well, it all ends up rather like America making the world safe for democracy.

I don't remember much other than the main character almost meeting himself as he enters the time-stream from different points. For some reason, this is considered a disaster. I don't know why. If I get chance, I would like to go forward and meet my older self, just to know how I made out.

Amy

Rating: really liked it
This is somehow my first Asimov book. At first, I was underwhelmed. However, as the book went forward, I found that there was much more depth to the writing than originally met the eye and that the shallow characters were shallow with a purpose.

Asimov sets up a group of scientist who are outside of time called the Eternals. While everyone on earth thinks that their main job is to facilitate commerce between various centuries, their true function is to manipulate history to make it play out more favorably. Thus, the Eternals have become gods without the people of the world knowing it. They've become puppeteers to a population that doesn't know to fight back, thus leaving the Eternals seemingly untouchable. It makes for an interesting polytheocracy where the people aren't even aware that their scientist have turned themselves into gods.

It seems that only the brightest, most analytical, most unquestioning, most inexperienced in life, and most naive need apply for the job of Eternal. Recruiters would need to find someone who lived their entire life with those qualities to hopefully ensure that they'd not eventually change into someone who would call for a revolution in Eternity because they could no longer agree with the level of control and puppetmastery that the Eternals wield. With such a combination of personality traits, Our Hero falls in love with the first scantily clad woman that throws herself his way. And, in so doing, he puts the very existence of Eternity in peril because he's willing to do whatever it takes to keep her. And upon this small rebellion, our story turns.

An interesting mystery is that the Eternals are shielded from being able to visit the future beyond a certain point. Apparently, future humans don't want the daliance of the Eternals in their affairs. Asimov makes the point that species evolve to adapt to their environment. However, since humans are able to adapt their environments to suit them, he postulates that humans have and will continue to evolve at much slower rates than beings that are unable to modify their environments. So we guess that future humans aren't that much different genetically from present-day humans. One wonders. My next read is Hominids (a book I've been wanting for ages which I received as a birthday gift) which imagines a parallel universe where Neanderthals did not die out or intermix with homo sapiens and eventually became more technologically advanced than we have during the same time period. I have a strong intrigue concerning the what-ifs of our evolutionary might-have-beens or our evolutionary future. I think fiction like this appeals to me simply because I only have one life to live and will never see our evolutionary future thousands or millions of years from now beyond an author's imagination. I'd love to see a far distant future as imagined by Asimov.

I'll certainly read Asimov again. The content of the story was merely okay, but the questions that he created for me while I was reading have left me wanting more.

Mark Harding

Rating: really liked it
Less than 200 pages. The same material nowadays would be expanded to at least 600 pages or probably a trilogy.

Well cool ideas:

* The time shafts are powered by our Sun going supernova in the distant future.
* Idealogical debate between Utilitarianism and ‘adventure’. (And fighting for frontiers) or ‘short term’ safety vs risk and long term growth.
* Everything that happens is intricately played out according to the central plot driver

I suppose because SF writers feel obliged to provide ‘characters’ and ‘texture’ and ‘a character journey’ this sort of stripped-down relating of plot and ideas wouldn’t be written now. Sure, characters and all that stuff is good, but there’s an attractive clarity of purpose to this book - especially when the plot becomes increasingly complex as the story progresses.

Rose

Rating: really liked it
Even though I tend to pick them apart, I love stories dealing with time-travel. Most end up creating what should be a paradox or forget little things that I tend to pick up on. Not this one. Asimov did a spectacular job. I thought I had him a couple of times but he covered everything.

Eternity, in this case, is something separate from our reality. The people who live there, the Eternals, have the ability to tweak our reality to produce different outcomes from those that occurred naturally. They start tweaking from the 2700’s going right up to the 70,000’s. Things ran smoothly for a long time until Eternal Harlan meets a girl. Everything always gets mucked up because of us, right? So Harlan decides he must have this girl, but because he’s not allowed he progressively gets into more trouble. Harlan’s real problem is that he doesn’t have all the information, nor do we until the very end, so he keeps messing things up and then has to fix them...until he has to break it all in the biggest way.

The writing was dated but not horribly so. Women were still not equals, but I think in the end we actually were. There wasn’t a lot of speculation as to how we would live in the future as the story focussed mainly on Eternity rather than reality, but it gave enough to make you dream of where humanity might be headed. A definite must-read for time-travel lovers!!

Dave

Rating: really liked it
Time Travel!

I am a huge fan of time travel, particularly when it's done well. And, should I expect anything less in the hands of Asimov? Long before we learned how to harness the pathways of time and to make the proper adjustments to each time reality, Asimov bequeathed to us this incredible novel that postulates a world where there me travel exists in a corridor known as Eternity and the Eternals, who live in this narrow corridor, travel tens of thousands of years in something like Wonka's giant glass elevators. They call them kettles. But, Asimov doesn't stop there with time travel tourism. In Eternity, the Eternals curate time. They analyze alternate realities and prevent great calamities like cancer or atomic war. A little adjustment now and then never hurt anybody.

But what if one of the Eternals meets a mere mortal in a time existence and falls for her many charms? Not hard to do because like the bunch of eggheads the science fiction boys were, there was always a "no girls allowed" sign out. And how does he protect this young lass from time adjustments that just might wink her out of existence? Where can he hide her? How does he escape notice with this time crime?

This is a brilliant wonderful book that only gets better the deeper you dive into it with all the time traps, time dilemmas, and paradoxical circles you can think up.

fromcouchtomoon

Rating: really liked it
Asimov is doing a couple of things here that raise a dull story to interesting, but you won't be able to catch it until the final two chapters. Dare I say this is a feminist critique of society?... I mean, as critical as a '50s dude from sexist academia could deliver? And delivered in quite possibly the most offensive way possible, at least to modern sensibilities? It partly serves as a polemic against critics of the space program (I smell a colleague confrontation brewing, Asi), partly an effort to challenge the '50s male view of, ahem, "girls," but mostly just a lame time travel romance with a pretty cool twist ending (almost exactly the kind my cynical self always hopes will happen in romance stories but never does). BUT, is this the very first time a time travel story employs magazine ads as communication between eras? If so, that's pretty cool!

Nərmin

Rating: really liked it
I loved this! It is very rare for e to like classic literature, and even though I love science fiction, classic sci-fi bores me with its dry writing style or dull characters. But this book! The cool ideas about time travel, science and society glued me to its pages! The writing style was okay and characters were tolerable. I really loved the ending as it resonates with my ideals (of free (selfish) choice and adventure& growth mindset over safe&boring life). Did I mention I loved the cool-crazy ideas? Yes, indeed, I loved the book. Recomended for people with sci-fi love in them!

Stephen

Rating: really liked it
4.0 to 4.5 Stars. Superb Asimov story and his best novel not set within the Foundation and Robot Universe.