The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov

So I've recently finished The End Of Eternity, and out of curiosity I decided to check the TVT page. To my consternation, I noticed that the original writer had a completely different perspective on some of the aspects than I did.

Now, instead of scraping 30% of the page's content by myself, I thought I'd open a thread to discuss it first (that is, if people read the book and care to discuss it) and then the thread can just carry on as a regular thread, since we lacked one for the book anyway.

• First issue, according to the trope page, the Technicians are "revered and feared", and that is not at all the understanding I got from the book. Harlan, the main character, is scarcely respected, constantly ignored or outright belittled. While it's true that Harlan gets delusion of grandeur all the time, it's only his perception. I think the book made a great job at showing us Harlan as a self-absorbed day-dreamer who 'wants' to be great and always imagine himself being so, but in the end is actually somewhat pathetic. Now, to his credits, Harlan isn't a dimwit and make a handful of good calls, but I think honestly his perception is mostly skewed and leads him to make poor decisions or assumptions. I'd change the trope page to reflect the actual positions of Technicians such as Harlan; they aren't revered, they are scorned because the other "specialists" blames them solely for the Reality Change and all the negative consequences, which is an hypocrite attitude since Reality Changes are a team effort, and not just the Technician's doing.

• Second issue, and somewhat of a lesser one; the trope page states that space travel is actively curbed to keep the humans on Earth. Now I could be wrong, but what I got from the book is that the Space Travel technologies always died out by themselves because they were Awesome, but Impractical. The way it is addressed in the trope page make it sound like it is always the doing of Eternity which curbs the spaceships, when it's actually a self-defeating activity 99% of the time, as stated by Harlan in the book, when discussing the disappearance of a specific kind of propulsion (and the spacecrafts they are associated with).

Thoughts?

I read this book and really liked it but its been so long that i'm kind of sketchy on the details. To your second point, i believe it was always the technicians responsible for making sure that space travel technology failed.

edited 6th Sep '14 6:46:58 AM by mrshine

Well to quote my copy directly, Harlan says at some point:

And continues by saying:

Harlan's lines seems to indicate that it's the Timers that themselves put a stop to space-travel, without Eternity's intervention. I don't recall any mention of Eternity voluntarily curbing space-travel, personally. Sociologist Voy's attitude (as well as Harlan's line) seems to indicate that Eternity is actually rooting for space-travel to happen and be sustainable.

The actual issue, as was raised by Noys, seems to be that humanity actually wasted its pool of "energy" on creating and maintaining Eternity instead of space-travel, and when they actually do leave Earth, the available planets are filled by then. But then again, it's Noys.

Question Marc is correct. Eternals don't have any agenda to prevent space travel. They try to stop things like wars, famine, and societal decay. They remark that space travel simply never gets very far because the problems outweigh the benefits, and Andrew only personally dislikes it because he feels like it's a wasteful dead-end.

Noys says outright that this is because humans have been so preoccupied with exploiting time travel that they never developed a certain interstellar drive. It's the whole point of their decision in the end to prevent Eternity from being formed, and instead kick-start nuclear science (so splitting the atom is first done in 1945 rather than in the 2900s when it would naturally have come about).

Humanity gets nukes, but also a leg up over all other sentient races in the galaxy since they can start colonizing other systems centuries sooner.

Edited by epistaxis_ on Feb 17th 2023 at 10:01:06 AM

It is a thing in the book that they're sabotaging space travel programs because they think they're a waste of time, it never seems to occur to them that they're just pushing the initial space trip out further and further and giving humanity less and less time to develop anything better in.

Harlan says space travel never gets anywhere, but they're speaking from the perspective of a reality that's already been engineered by Eternity for a long time. They're not deliberately trying to erase space travel, but in making life on Earth as pleasant and peaceful as possible, they're a) removing the pressures that would make space colonization seem appealing, and b) ensuring society's resources are optimized for maintaining that peaceful society, not put into exploration for exploration's sake.

Zendervai : They're never trying to stop space travel as a goal. The early change we see Harlan do only slows space travel as an unfortunate consequence of reducing its drug addiction prevalence.

I think it's just to act as an example situation to show how one small change has multiple effects later in the timeline, and the kinds of decisions Eternity has to make. Voy even laments that it's a shame this change has to weaken that century's unique space travel technology, so they're certainly not trying to prevent it. It just happens to do that in this one case.

Edited by epistaxis_ on Feb 18th 2023 at 12:02:05 PM