The End of Eternity

An Early Asimov Effort - he wrote better later. You’ll never guess the twist in the tail!

I'd forgotten that Asimov actually learned how to write. Having most recently read his original Foundation books and I, Robot I was expecting successive scenes with one person talking to another about ideas. Instead we get a high-concept mystery thriller with a complex narrative structure. It's almost a noir SF novel, with a hero disintegrating under pressure as convincingly as any Simenon or Highsmith central character.The Eternals, a near-monastic organization that lives outside regular time, are like the Time Lords except that instead of standing aloof they constantly tinker with alterations to the course of history. I liked that because usually these organizations set great store by preserving the "original" timeline spawned by random events. This policy of active interference proves to be a major plot point.Time travel novels always require the writer to set up some rules. It's the nature of the genre that those rules may not hold up if you scrutinize them too closely, but at one point Asimov seems to forget his own rules anyhow. He has an alteration in Reality change some old magazines stored in Eternity (the zone outside time where the Eternals live). Yet the whole point of the novel up till now is that if a person is brought into Eternity then they are unaffected by changes to their original timeline. If that weren't so, the Eternals themselves would be a constant risk of disappearing. The protagonist even uses this rule to protect a non-Eternal from the effects of a change in their century. So the magazines should have been brought into Eternity after the change -- yet Asimov says that the pages physically alter every time a change is made outside Eternity, violating his own rule.That aside, I liked it a lot. You might find the the all-male nature of Eternity contrived and a bit dated (in The Machine Stops fifty years earlier, Forster assumed the far future would have just as many leading women as leading men) but that's no different from the all-male college of magicians in Earthsea, say. (Although admittedly something like that makes more sense in fantasy than in SF, which we expect to abide by other rules than just the author's.) Anyway, bear with that as Asimov is fully aware of it and we discover that he's not propounding this as the natural and inevitable state of all human organizations.

Isaac Asimov is certainly one of the most reliable sci-fi authors. He infallibly provides clever plots, full of intelligent twists, scientific knowledge and unexpected reasoning. And The End of Eternity does not stain this unblemished record. For a quite short story (190 pages) it puts together an interesting proposition for time travel and discusses its obvious implications and potential paradoxes.The plot is centered around the existence of an organization, Eternity, outside regular temporal flow. This organization can access every century of human history since its creation on the 24th century (before that are the primitive centuries where temporal flow is immutable), until the 70.000th century (the hidden centuries, blocked by some kind of barrier). It also assumes an active role in shaping human history by conducting surgical modifications in its normal course (or the one with maximum probability of happening), thus creating multiple realities. Eternity is run by Eternals, mostly male humans that are subtracted from their realities in childhood to live almost as disciples of time.The End of Eternity introduces many of the most obvious time-travel paradoxes, such as one meeting with oneself, or a Bootstrap Paradox. But perhaps the most important discussion resides on the actual good of performing changes in time, even if with best intentions. Asimov, as usual, provides clear explanations of the assumptions behind his sci-fi constructs. One that I found particularly interesting is the limited impact of timeline modifications. Asimov considers that any change will wear out in a couple of centuries, and not exponentially increase its effects across human history.Of course the narrative also includes a human side, even a love story that will decisively change the course of history. And, as always, Asimov provides an unexpected finale where everything comes together quite nicely.

I first read Asimov's time-based novella in my late teens. I'd re-read the Foundation trilogy (none of the later add-ons thank goodness) several times and was looking for something new from such a great sci-fi master. The story didn't disappoint.Over the years, the ideas behind The End of Eternity have stayed firmly imprinted in my mind - it was a slow burner, but I came to understand what a visionary work of genius it was. Recently I re-read the book and found myself awed by the brilliant simplicity of the idea behind it, and the fabulous architecture of the story.The book is perhaps an attack on utilitarianism (the greatest happiness for the greatest number), claiming that, to be our very best, humans must have room to breathe, spread out and create. The discussion of the need for or dreadful waste of resources that space exploration represents is as important and relevant now as it was in 1955 when first published.The main protagonist, Andrew Harlan, is a very special member of the human society known as Eternity. He's a technician, responsible for tweaking history here and there to constantly improve humanity's lot. Depending on your point of view, it's his own human frailties that either jeopardize his hard work or threaten to put a stop to this meddling with time.The imagination is five star as is the plot construction. The quality of the actual writing doesn't reach those dizzy heights and is clunky at times, but it's well worth persevering with to leave you with a memory that will last for ever, or at least until the next reality change...

This was a book I had only read once because even libraries struggled to get copies of it, I’ve been wanting to read it again ever since and now I can thanks to Panther Books