The End Of Eternity

The End of Eternity (2000) by Isaac Asimov
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
ISBN: 9780586024409
Condition: Good
Sold by: Crappy Old Books

Time travel is a wonderful idea, provided nobody actually invents it. Imagine the possibilities: preventing wars, correcting embarrassing decisions, buying shares in Microsoft before anyone knew what a computer was, or returning to 1973 to warn people about the impending horrors of polyester. Unfortunately, as Isaac Asimov demonstrates in The End of Eternity, giving humanity the ability to manipulate history is rather like giving a committee of civil servants control over the universe. Everything becomes terribly efficient, meticulously regulated and potentially disastrous.

Welcome to Eternity, an organisation existing outside conventional time, staffed by specialists who travel between centuries making carefully calculated alterations to human history. Their objective is admirably straightforward: eliminate suffering, avert catastrophe and ensure that civilisation progresses along the safest possible path. Naturally, this requires an enormous bureaucracy, complicated regulations and the occasional quiet removal of entire possible futures. All in the interests of public welfare, of course.

Andrew Harlan is a Technician, one of Eternity’s trained operatives responsible for implementing Reality Changes. He is dedicated, disciplined and thoroughly convinced that his work serves humanity’s greater good. Unfortunately, Harlan commits the one offence guaranteed to cause difficulties in any well-ordered institution: he falls in love.

The object of his affections is Noÿs Lambent, a mysterious woman whose existence begins to complicate his understanding of Eternity, its motives and the supposedly unquestionable wisdom of its interventions. Suddenly, the careful manipulation of centuries becomes entangled with distinctly inconvenient human emotions. Rules are broken, loyalties tested and the philosophical foundations of an entire civilisation begin looking rather less secure than their architects might have hoped.

Asimov, one of science fiction’s towering intellectual figures, constructs an extraordinarily clever puzzle around the paradoxes of time travel. But beneath the intricate machinery lies a more uncomfortable question: should anyone possess the authority to determine humanity’s future, even with the noblest intentions?

After all, preventing every disaster might also prevent every extraordinary achievement. Remove uncertainty, danger and suffering, and humanity might become wonderfully comfortable while simultaneously losing the ambition to accomplish anything interesting. A perfectly safe civilisation could turn out to be a perfectly stagnant one, rather like a suburban residents’ association given control of cosmic history.

Originally published in 1955, The End of Eternity remains one of Asimov’s most ingenious standalone novels, combining scientific speculation, romance, conspiracy and philosophical argument into a tightly constructed adventure. It is the sort of book that encourages readers to contemplate causality, free will and whether somebody travelling backwards through time might already have interfered with their breakfast.

This 2000 HarperCollinsPublishers edition is in Good condition and offered by Crappy Old Books, where we operate under the comforting assumption that time moves forwards, customers pay in the present and nobody will travel back to prevent the purchase.

Although, should somebody invent a functioning time machine, we would be extremely interested in returning to an era when second-hand books cost sixpence and postage was practically free.

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