The End of Eternity
The End of Eternity is a 1955 science fiction novel by Isaac Asimov with mystery and thriller elements on the subjects of time travel and social engineering. Its ultimate premise is that of a causal loop, a type of temporal paradox in which events and their causes form a loop.
For the Pathfinder book, see List of Pathfinder books § Pathfinder Adventure Path books. For the video game known in Japan as The End of Eternity, see Resonance of Fate.Author
English
1955
United States
191
In The End of Eternity, members of the time-changing organization Eternity, known as "Eternals", seek to ensure that the conditions that led to its founding occur as history says that they occurred. At the end of the novel the protagonist, Andrew Harlan, is placed in a situation in which he must decide whether to allow the "circle" to close and Eternity to be founded or to allow the opposite to happen and prevent Eternity from having ever existed.
Many years later, Asimov tied this novel into his broader Foundation Series by hinting in Foundation's Edge that it is set in a universe where Eternity had existed but was destroyed by Eternals, leading to an all-human galaxy later.
The novel was shortlisted to the Hugo Award for Best Novel.
Plot[edit]
In the future, humanity uses time travel to construct Eternity, an organization "outside time" that aimed to improve human happiness by observing human history and, after careful analysis, directly making small actions that cause "reality changes" and help to establish trade between the various centuries to help those in most need. Its members, known as "Eternals" and by the roles that they hold, prioritize the reduction of human suffering at the cost of a loss to technology, art, and other endeavors, which are prevented from existing when they are judged to have a detrimental effect. Those enlisted travel "upwhen" and "downwhen" and re-enter time in devices called "kettles". They are unable to travel to times before the 27th century, when the temporal field powering Eternity was established, the limit being known as the "downwhen terminus". Also, the future of humanity's fate is unknown since the earth is empty by the year 15 million (the 150,000th century, or the 15,000th millennia), but that is preceded by a period called the Hidden Centuries, or the Void Millennia, from the years 7 million to 15 million (the 70,000th to the 150,000th centuries or 7,000th to the 15,000th millennia) in which for unknown reasons, they cannot access the world outside Eternity to learn more.
Andrew Harlan is an Eternal and an outstanding Technician, a specialist at implementing reality changes, who is fascinated by the Primitive times. Senior Computer Laban Twissell, the Dean of the Allwhen Council, instructs Harlan to teach a newcomer, Brinsley Sheridan Cooper, about the Primitive. Meanwhile, Harlan is also tasked by Assistant Computer Finge to spend a week in the 482nd century. He stays with Noÿs Lambent, a non-Eternal member of the period's aristocracy and falls in love with her. However, he discovers that a reality change will affect the century, and wishing to preserve Noÿs as she is, he breaks Eternal law, removes her from time, and hides her in the empty sections of Eternity that exist in the Hidden Centuries.
Harlan later finds that the kettles will not travel to the time in which he hid Noÿs because of a mysterious block at the 100,000th century (the year 10 million). He confronts Finge with a weapon and accuses him of sabotaging matters out of jealousy, but Finge states that he reported Harlan's conduct and denies placing the block. Harlan is summoned to the council but is not reprimanded. He deduces that because his transgressions were ignored, he must be there to serve a larger purpose. Harlan confronts Twissell and explains that he has been teaching himself temporal mathematics and believes that its 23rd-century inventor, Vikkor Mallansohn, must have been helped in his discovery by someone from his future. He concludes that his current role is training Cooper to do so. Twissell confirms that and adds that unknown to Cooper, Mallansohn's secret memoirs show that Cooper is the famous inventor Mallansohn. That must be kept from Cooper so that Eternity will be founded as it historically was. Harlan blackmails Twissell by threatening to destroy Cooper's ignorance unless Noÿs is returned, but he is outwitted. Twissell locks him in the control room with all controls deactivated other than the lever to send Cooper back, which matches the memoirs' statement that to have been was his role. Harlan, enraged, breaks open the controls and changes the power output, which causes Cooper to be sent back to an unknown time, which is estimated to be in the early 20th century.
Twissell is aghast, but as Eternity still exists, he theorizes that he can undo Harlan's damage and send Cooper back correctly for his mission. They think that Cooper might try to communicate by using an advertisement in one of Harlan's Primitive magazines, which would stand out only to an Eternal. Harlan finds that a magazine from 1932 has changed and now shows an advertisement in the form of a mushroom cloud, which no human could have known of in 1932. However, Harlan refuses to tell Twissell about the advertisement until they bring Noÿs back from the Hidden Centuries, but Twissell insists that the block that Harlan encountered is theoretically impossible. As the two travel far upwhen to get her, Twissell speculates that the Hidden Centuries are a time in which humans evolved into something greater, do not want to be meddled with, and so blocked off Eternity's access to time from the 70,000th to the 150,000th century. He supposes that when Harlan inhabited an Eternity outpost in the Hidden Centuries with Noÿs, those future humans may have worried that Eternity was beginning an invasion, which led them to retaliate with a kettle block at the 100,000th century to prevent any more encroachments. However, Harlan and Twissell pass the 100,000th century unhindered and find Noÿs. Harlan then agrees to travel downwhen and to bring back Cooper so that he can be sent to the correct time for his mission but only if Noÿs comes with him.
On arrival in 1932, Harlan holds Noÿs at gunpoint and reveals that he suspects her of being from the Hidden Centuries and that he has brought her so that she could not harm Eternity. Noÿs acknowledges that she is from that time and explains that her people have also developed time travel, but their method shows many possible futures, rather than just one future, as is seen by Eternity. They learned that humans would have been the first species to spread into the galaxy, but in each future in which Eternity existed, safety was given a priority, and by the time that humans had reached the stars, other species predominated and prevented them. As a result, humanity would become depressed and gradually die out. Noÿs's mission was to make the minimum change to history to remedy that by preventing Eternity from ever being founded. There were multiple ways of achieving that, and she chose an approach in which she and Harlan were together. Noÿs gives Harlan the choice of killing her and preserving Eternity or letting her live and allowing a different future to arise. Harlan, remembering the unhealthy interpersonal relationships between the Eternals and the sociological damage that he has seen to be done to people whose original "homewhen" had ceased to exist, begins to agree with her. Suddenly, a reality change occurs, and the kettle disappears, which indicates that Eternity now never happened. The book ends by stating that it was "the end of Eternity – and the beginning of Infinity".
Reception[edit]
The book was highly acclaimed by critics. The New York Times reviewer Villiers Gerson praised the novel by stating it "has suspense on every page" and "exhibits in every chapter the plot twists for which the author is famous."[2] In a 1972 review, Lester del Rey declared that no one "has wrung so much out of... or has developed all the possibilities of paradox."[3]
As noted by the critic Susan Young,[4] John Crowley's award-winning 1989 novella "Great Work of Time" has the same basic outline as The End of Eternity, a secret society of well-meaning time travelers bent on remodeling history and a young man recruited into the society to make a specific change that would bring the society itself into being. The details of what the time travelers do and when in time they operate are very different from those in Asimov's book. However, in both books, the society's operations come to a halt through the influence of people from the future for reasons that have to do with the existence of that future. Young also notes a similarity with Poul Anderson's The Corridors of Time, which also depicts a complex society of time travelers who find sections of the future inaccessible; also in Anderson's book, the intervention of the people of that further future plays a pivotal and cataclysmic role in the plot.
Charles Stross has stated that his 2009 novella Palimpsest is effectively a rewrite of The End of Eternity.[5]
There are also similarities to John Brunner's Times Without Number, which was originally published in 1962 and revised for re-publication in 1969. However, in that story, the time-policing organization struggles in vain to prevent its own annihilation; the conclusion is that timelines in which time travel arises are unstable and cannot sustain their existence.
Role in Foundation series[edit]
As written, The End of Eternity suggests that the new reality is the one that leads onto the Galactic Empire and Foundation but does not confirm it. The mechanism of time travel is most likely not the one stumbled across in Pebble in the Sky because of Harlan's words about the energy requirement for the Temporal Field. The "neuronic whip" from The Currents of Space and other stories in the "Empire" future is also found in The End of Eternity, again as something that had to be removed from reality. There are also no aliens to compete with humans: in "Blind Alley", the aliens' predicament is rather like what will overtake humanity if Eternity is not prevented.
The original unpublished End of Eternity is clearly a different future from that of the Foundation, but Asimov says in his story-postscript that he had some idea of a bridge in the published version.[6]
Asimov placed a hint in Foundation's Edge, many years later, that the Eternals might have been responsible for the all-human galaxy and the development of humanity on Earth of the Foundation Series,[7] but that interpretation is disputed. Asimov himself mentions the disparity.[8] The human-like robots may have been intended to play a part.[9]
According to Alasdair Wilkins, in a discussion posted on Gizmodo, "Asimov absolutely loves weird, elliptical structures. All three of his non-robot/Foundation science fiction novels — The End of Eternity, The Gods Themselves, and Nemesis — leaned heavily on non-chronological narratives, and he does it with gusto in The Gods Themselves."
Translations[edit]
The End of Eternity has been translated into over 25 languages. The Russian translation, first edition 1966, was heavily censored because of both sexual references and sociological discussions that were unacceptable to Soviet ideology.
For some time, The End of Eternity was out of print, but that was remedied with Tor Books' 2011 hardcover reissue and a recent move to various e-book formats.[10]
In 2008, New Regency acquired the rights to the novel for a possible film adaptation.[12]