The End of Eternity: Isaac Asimov’s Time-Travel Novel of Love Against an All-Powerful Bureaucracy
"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom," Isaac Asimov once wrote. The End of Eternity (1955) turns that idea into a story. Eternity exists in all times and beyond time: a society of intellectuals sworn to preserve the human race. But when you can manipulate reality, how can a man resist the temptation to change it in his own favour? And what might the consequences be?
Author: Isaac Asimov (1920–1992)
Title: The End of Eternity (1955)
Format: English Kindle edition
Scope: Standalone time-travel novel
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/B07GLL4R55 (ASIN B07GLL4R55)
Eternity
In the twenty-seventh century, Earth founds an organisation called Eternity, which sends its agents into the past and the future to open trade between the ages and to alter the long and sometimes tragic history of the human race. Only the best and brightest of each century join it: people who set aside their own lives to devote themselves to serving others. For men like Andrew Harlan, Eternity is much more than a job: it is his life.
Andrew Harlan
Harlan is an Eternal, a man whose work consists of travelling through the centuries, monitoring and, when necessary, altering the countless chains of cause and effect in time. But everything changes when he travels to the 482nd century and cannot help falling madly in love with a beautiful non-Eternal named Noÿs Lambent.
How Eternity Works
Asimov builds his time-travel bureaucracy with relish. Eternity sits outside ordinary Time, connected to the centuries by a kind of lift shaft. Its members are divided into specialists: Computers, who calculate the effects of possible changes; Observers, who report on each century; Life-Plotters, who trace the fate of individuals; and Technicians, like Harlan, who carry out the Reality Changes. A Technician’s job is to make the "minimum necessary change", moving a container from one shelf to another, perhaps, so that history takes a different course and a war or a disaster never happens.
The Price of Safety
The novel’s central question is whether a humanity protected from every catastrophe is better off. Each Reality Change removes suffering, but it also removes risk, ambition and the chance of greatness, and Eternity has quietly steered the human race towards a comfortable, cautious mediocrity. Harlan’s love for Noÿs Lambent forces him to confront what Eternity is really doing, and Asimov’s ending answers the question in a way that connects to the vision of a galaxy-spanning humanity found in his other books.
A Writer’s Puzzle
Harlan’s hobby is the history of the "Primitive" centuries, including our own twentieth, which he studies through old magazines, and that knowledge turns out to be crucial. His apprentice, the gifted young Brinsley Sheridan Cooper, and his mentor, the chain-smoking Senior Computer Twissell, are central to a plot that loops back on itself like a perfectly constructed paradox. Asimov first wrote the idea as a shorter piece before developing it into the novel published in 1955, and he regarded it as one of his best.
Who Should Read It
Readers who enjoy time-travel paradoxes, and anyone who knows Asimov only for robots and Foundation. A Soviet film version appeared in 1987.
Tip
Pay attention to the twentieth-century details Harlan collects; they are planted for a reason.
Note
It is short enough to finish in a weekend, and the final pages invite an immediate reread.
On the Run Through Time
Now, pursued by an all-powerful bureaucracy, Harlan and his beloved flee through the centuries, ready to break every rule necessary to preserve their future together, even if it means destroying Eternity itself. It is one of Asimov’s most satisfying standalone novels, with a time-travel plot that fits together like clockwork.
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