This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Looney Toons: Schol-R-LEA (no clone number?) — There was already an entry for "The Nail" in the examples on this page. (However, when Ununnilum got done with editing your version of it, it was better than the original, so I kept yours and nuked the other. Still, doublecheck before adding an example, especially if there are a good number of them.)
Ununnilium: I don't think that one time-travel example is a tomato surprise; I think the point is they were originally human, but the travel altered things so they were blobs.
YYZ: The point of the story is that things have been different all along from the way we expected them to be. Thanks to the time-travel device, human evolution turned out completely differently — and we don't find out until the narrator gives those details in the final lines of the story, which makes it a Tomato Surprise. Actually, it reminds me of a Robert Sheckley story that would fit well in Tomato Surprise.
Ununnilium: But it hasn't been that way the whole story; it only becomes that way because of the time-trip. It'd only be a Tomato Surprise if it was a story about time-traveling blobs who really hadn't changed history.
YYZ: All right. I just thought that it was pretty close to the canonical example of Tomato Surprise - you don't find out until the end that the hero is a tomato, you don't find out until the end that we're in a universe that's already been altered by the time-travel device.
Paul A: The point is that the reason you don't find out until the end that we're in a universe that's already been altered by the device is because until the end we're not.
At the beginning of the story, before they send the machine back in time, the PR man and the observers are all ordinary ape-descended life-forms. Then they send the machine back in time, the PR man gives his speech about how safe it is, the time machine comes back — and the PR blob draws himself up onto his pseudopods and says, "There, you see? Nothing has changed!"
(And although there's no physical description of the characters in the middle of the story, only the transcript of the PR guy's speech, you can still see in his choice of words the moment when history changes.)
Rock Sunner: There is still an uncanny preservation of one critical paradox-averting fact: these very different beings are still performing the same time experiment at the same time and place, though perhaps for different reasons. Why this should be is unexplained. It's even more absurd in Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder," where the society still has time-travel and allows its use for hunting prehistoric animals, and has equivalents of the same two men running for President (with a new preference for the dictatorial one).
Seven Seals: Took out:
- Mythological example: Eris, Greek goddess of discord, isn't invited at the wedding of Achilles' parents. In revenge, she causes three goddesses to quarrel for possession of her Golden Apple of Discord. Paris, prince of Troy, is asked to decide. He chooses Aphrodite, goddess of love, in exchange for the heart of Helen, fairest of all women and queen of Sparta. When Helen is taken away, her husband Menelaus and brother-in-law Agamemnon invoke an oath sworn by every other king in Greece and start the Trojan war, with all its consequenses (the death of Achilles, the sacking of Troy and Odysseus' long journey home, to name a few).
John C. Wright Took out:
- In "The Last Guardian of Everness" by John C. Wright, a man named Raven is offered the chance to save his dying wife Wendy by a mysterious shadowy man. The cost? He has to give the shadow permission to kill someone else in the hospital, "a stranger, someone you don't even know." Unfortunately for the world at large, the "unimportant stranger" is Galen Waylock, the last keeper of the gates to Everness and protector of this world from the nightmares of Dream. Everything kind of goes to hell after that.
It's a nice illustration of how one action can have major effects, but the key to For Want Of A Nail is that it involves time travel (or alternate universes, less specifically). My book (I am the author) is not a time travel book.
Thanks for reading, though!
fleb: Cut the TL;DR spoiler bars for Doctor Who's "Turn Left." It's really not necessary to get too involved if you're just going to put 99% as a spoiler anyway.
- ** Played straight in the episode "Turn Left", in which Donna turns right at an intersection instead of left, gets a different job, and because of this she never meets The Doctor. This leads to his death, which leads to; the death of most of the main characters, the spaceship Titanic from "Voyage of the Damned" crashing into and nuking London, the deaths of sixty million Americans due to the fat pills from "Partners in Crime", the British government setting up concentration camps, and her own death when she has to go back in time and throw herself in front of a truck to make her past self turn left. Ouch.
Twilight: I remember an educational film I saw once, I'm not sure if it should go her or in Wonderful Life. The plot was that a group of kids found Martin Luther King Jr.'s watch and it let them time travel to parts of his life. The group saw parts of his life from childhood to his protests to help end racism. This is where the example comes in: the kids find out that he gets shot, and want to make sure that he sees what a difference he will make on the world. So one of the kids goes back to his childhood and brings him to modern day...except without Jr's influence, civil rights never caught on, and the present day is a much darker world where the evils of racism still run rampant. In the end, Jr. goes back to his own time to make sure that such a world is never created.
