The End of Eternity

Here's my second foray into Asimov novels, and once again it comes to me courtesy of a used book store. It's a time travel story from the early 1950s and its set all over the far off future. Just like the last Asimov book I read, Foundation, this one had some interesting premises but some mediocre writing and storytelling. I'll dive right in.

"Eternity" is a time traveling device that lets a select few people - "Eternals" - travel throughout the timeline, all the way to ten million years in the future, in order to make small tweaks and corrections for the betterment of mankind. Of course, every change made for the benefit of one century creates ripple effects that propagate forward, altering things for several millennia afterward. Interestingly though, there's no so-called butterfly effect, wherein altering something minor in one century completely changes the face of society a few million years down the line. Instead, the reverberations felt throughout the timeline kind of dissipate after a few thousand years, and things remain entirely unchanged before you make it to, say, ten thousand. This implies a sort of deterministic pattern to the universe and suggests that you can't really change the fate of the universe in any meaningful way. I buy it!

At any rate, it turns out that the protagonist in the book is sent way back in time in order to build Eternity in the first place. That's sort of weird, since it creates a causal loop, but, yeesh, whatever, time travel logic is all over the place depending on the author, scientist, philosopher, you name it. Except, someone else in the book doesn't want Eternity to get created at all; she's from the way, way, way distant future, and she thinks that by focusing entirely on time travel, humankind has deprived itself of space travel. Since the earth is doomed eventually, it's space travel that matters, not time travel. And that's more or less the conflict presented here after a hundred pages of exposition and explanations.

I didn't really love this one. There were some neat ideas presented here, but the story tying them all together was nothing special. Eh, oh well.