168 - One Hundred Sixty Eight

[TRANSCRIPT]

[click, static]

Okay, so I’ve been reading this fucking book, The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov and I finally finished it …

Listen, it’s not really my thing. Not that sci-fi isn’t my thing, but I’m not sure this kind of sci-fi is up my alley. And why are male writers so weird about women so often?

That’s not the point. The point is…I assume you’re trying to tell me something with this. That you’re trying to say that this somehow holds the answers. 

I’m going to assume also that it doesn’t hold all the answers. That it’s more of a…nudge in the right direction. A shorthand for you to use to try and easily explain complicated shit to me. 

You know, you’d think Birdie would’ve been able to figure something out like this, right? Presumably they’ve also read books. 

Anyway. The End of Eternity. It’s about time travel. Or, well, not time travel, but—actually, there is literal time travel, in these things called kettles but it’s not time travel the way we think about time travel, you know, it’s—

Let me start over. There’s this guy, Andrew Harlan, he’s the main character, and he works for this god-like organization called “Eternity” that basically…alters reality to make humans suffer less. But they can only go back in time so far because the technology to go upwhen and downwhen—that’s what they call going up and down the…timeline, I guess, which I think is sort of cute actually—so, yeah, they can only go back in time so far because that technology was only invented in the 27th century, and they can only go so far forward because after a certain point, the world is just…empty. And they don’t really know why.

So, yeah. There’s that. And Harlan brings Nöys—that’s this woman that he falls in love with when he’s in a certain time and that time is supposed to be altered, so she’s going to disappear—or, the version he knows of her is going to disappear, she’s going to change because of the way that Eternity is going to alter reality and he’s you know, falling in love with her and he doesn’t want her to change so he brings her on a kettle to one of those empty centuries to hide her from Eternity and keep her safe, keep her trapped in amber.

Which…well, listen, I have a lot of thoughts about that, but I’m not here to get into what Asimov is saying about women or being in love or any of that. I’m here to try to understand what the hell you want me to get out of this. 

I haven’t time traveled. I’m not in some kind of far, distant future after humanity has ceased to exist, because everything’s the same, just minus all the people. If I’m living in the Hidden Centuries, why do they look the same and how did I get here?

At the end of the book…well, it turns out that Nöys isn’t exactly who she said she was, surprise surprise, and she and Harlan have this stand-off. She’s from a version of time that also had time travel, but not Eternity, so they had lots of different futures instead of just the one that Eternity would always be making by altering reality. That’s Eternity’s big thing—that’s what people like Harlan would do. They would go to different times and do different things so that Eternity could perfectly shape the history and the future of the world in the way they thought it should be shaped. But Nöys…her time didn’t do that—they came about the technology a different way and saw things differently. And she tries to convince Harlan that that’s the better way to do things and I guess he does get convinced because all of a sudden, something in reality changes and the kettles disappear, so it turns out that Eternity never happened—oh, they have this stand-off in the 30s—the 1930s—somehow, so it’s before Eternity is invented and Harlan choosing not to kill Nöys in the 1930s prevents the future from ever happening and so Eternity isn’t created. I think. And the book closes with “the end of eternity, the beginning of infinity” which is a nice sounding phrase, but I’m not sure it means anything. 

I’m not sure any of this means anything. Trying to explain it out loud, I feel like a total crackpot. What, exactly, am I supposed to be gleaning from all of this? [click, static]

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