The End of Eternity →
In the summer Threepenny Review, Wendy Lesser reviews a reissue of Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity:
For Asimov, super-civilization and technological achievement always go hand-in-hand with a general softening or attenuation of the human spirit, and it is only by getting back to basics (or intuition, or felt sensation) that people can continue to move ahead.
The summer I was fourteen, we stayed in the house of a co-worker of my father’s while the co-worker’s family was in southern France. Someone in the family was a huge Asimov fan, and on particularly cold days when my dad was working, I would sit in a little white sitting room with a wall of windows out onto a windy garden and read Asimov. I still find The End of Eternity’s set-up pleasing to puzzle over. It’s like math as a story, the idea of a time-line with centuries like subway stops at different dates. Except for
the “hidden” centuries between the 70,000th and the 150,000th. [W]hen they [the Eternals] enter the system after that, all they find is a dead, uninhabited, featureless world.
Why are the centuries hidden? Don’t you just have to find out?
