Greatly Belated Book Review: The End of Eternity

(Over at the Writing Blog, I give my thoughts on the timey wimey ball. Don't worry, I'll explain what the heck I mean by that over there.)

I've never been one for playing the "What's/who's your favorite _____?" game, but as authors go, I'll generally read almost anything by Isaac Asimov that gets put in front of me. (The same is true of Timothy Zahn.) He was a great idea man, a master of the English language, and just plain knew how to create an interesting scenario.

The End of Eternity is, hands down, the best novel about time travel I've ever read, and probably the best novel about time travel I'm ever going to read. After this, I'm unlikely to even want to read many other time travel stories (I'm not generally a big fan of time travel stories anyway).

The crux of the story is this: Eternity is an organization that was originally founded to establish trade between time periods, but which rapidly evolved into a social engineering project on an absurd scale, with what were almost certainly trillions or quadrillions of individuals working on a tremendous scale, altering and tweaking the flow of time to make society the best society it could be.

The main character is noted as being one of the best Eternals at making the changes out of the entire society. When presented with how to engineer a particular time flow change, he was able to whittle the method of enacting the change from a) killing dozens of people in an accident to b) moving an item on a shelf to another shelf where it would take longer to find. Yes, really. This book is that awesome.

Asimov clearly put quite a lot of thought into things. His consideration of the logistics, methodologies, and the like is superb and complete. The only thing that strikes me as a logic flaw is somewhat critical to the book, but not to the point that it is unreadable. The flaw in question is that women can't become Eternals, supposedly because their leaving history causes greater disruptions in time's flow, and the Eternals are all carefully chosen to avoid that.

Presumably, Asimov's logic had something to do with reproduction, but the removal of a man from a gene pool would probably have a more dramatic effect than the removal of a woman. Think about it. Like it or no, men are more capable of spreading their genetics around than women.

That aside, it's a great book with a brilliant plot twist at the end. To say much more would ruin it.

-Signing off.