Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity

conclusion

by Don Webb

Part 1 appears in this issue.

The author continues his conversation with a friendly alter ego about the place of the novel in Asimov’s works. Reminder: the conversation is all spoiler.

[Don W.] Among other things, The End of Eternity is the key to the Foundation series.

[Alt. E.] What?! It’s a time-travel story, and it’s set only on Earth. We’ve already said that the Foundations have no part in it. It has to come before even the galactic novels, doesn’t it?

Well, yes... The story ends in the year 1932. But beginnings are often written last. Look at the publishing chronology: Pebble in the Sky, 1950; The Stars, Like Dust and Foundation, 1951; The Currents of Space and Foundation and Empire, 1952; Second Foundation, 1953; and The End of Eternity, 1955, although it was begun in late 1953.

I see... The Galactic Empire and Foundation novels appeared in parallel and, with one exception, in the order of their own chronology. The End of Eternity falls completely outside that pattern.

Precisely my point. The Foundation series took shape between 1942 and its first novel, Foundation, in 1951. When Asimov began The End of Eternity, he had just finished the original Foundation series. The End of Eternity can be read as a kind of prologue.

But it’s about time travel, not space travel. You never tire of saying you’re fond of time travel stories. Does that have something to do with this revisionist criticism you’re undertaking?

Yes, it’s true, I am fond of time travel stories. But Asimov most definitely was not. His article on “Thiotimoline” was a spoof on playing with time, and it’s probably the longest joke he ever told. In only one other novel, as far as I know, does Asimov use time travel: Pebble in the Sky. And there it’s a dramatic device: he sends Joseph Schwartz on a one-way trip from Asimov’s present to the year 827 of the Galactic Empire.

I’ve sometimes wondered why. A native of that year might have done what Schwartz does.

That would have obscured the connection with Asimov’s own time, the mid-20th century, and Asimov goes out of his way to make analogies with Earth’s past history. Time travel also stacks the deck against Joseph Schwartz by making him an outsider in the future. Of course, that very status leads to his being given almost by accident a crucial weapon: telepathy and mind control.

Telepathy is a major, recurrent theme in Asimov’s novels. Is it in The End of Eternity, as well?

No, it doesn’t appear at all. Rather, time travel is central to the action. The “Eternals” — who own time travel — use it systematically to tamper with history.

I’m beginning to get a glimmer how this might fit in with the Second Foundation...

Both the Second Foundation and the Eternals have a policy of intervening at key moments to influence history, and both have good intentions. The Second Foundation, as the covert political arm of the Foundations, basically promotes peace and democracy, while the First Foundation is the front office, so to speak, the technological and administrative branch.

But the Eternals’ program seems to be mostly an ad hoc conservatism. They concentrate on suppressing such things as wars and gross inequality, like slavery; even smoking, can you believe. And they distrust technology, mainly because it threatens to make their work all the harder. They sidetrack nuclear research for fear it might develop weapons, and they frown mightily on space travel. In fact, the Eternals literally have no time for it; they consider it a big waste of resources, and they move to prevent it whenever it occurs.

Trouble is, the Eternals find that history has a momentum all its own and tends to smooth out their interference. They really have their work cut out for them to keep history going the way they want.

Shades of Asimov’s short story, “Trends.” And from your description, the name Hari Seldon also comes to mind...

Andrew Harlan is recognized as a genius at calculating the “MNC’s,” minimum necessary changes. For example, he can sneak into Time, displace a simple object at the right moment and prevent someone from inventing space travel. Harlan’s talents as a Technician would have made him a first-rate Second Foundationer.

So, both the Second Foundation and the Eternals engage in covert operations. But their agendas are completely at odds: the Second Foundation promotes progress in the galaxy; the Eternals sabotage it on Earth. And the Eternals have nothing like the Seldon Plan?

Apparently not. The Seldon Plan is not really as inevitable as it’s cracked up to be, but it’s no secret: the First Foundation practically carries it as its flag, so to speak. The Eternals seem to operate more by consensus, and they sure don’t want anybody else to know about it.

However, Hari Seldon does have a counterpart in The End of Eternity : Laban Twissell, a senior member of the Allwhen Council. But there the resemblance ends: Seldon is a venerable, almost Moses-like figure; Twissell is a chain-smoking neurotic. At the end, when Andrew Harlan takes rash action and outmaneuvers him, Twissell panics, because the Eternals’ continued existence depends on Harlan’s decisions and even his state of mind. The situation is profoundly comic, and Twissell himself is pathetic.

I grant you, the Eternals seem to turn the Second Foundation upside down. How did they get started, anyway?

By a ludicrous paradox of their own creation. The conclusion of the novel hinges on their sending a recruit back to the 27th century to invent time travel; it’s not just circular logic, it’s circular existence. Harlan puts a spoke in their wheel by moving a control lever too far in the “time kettle” and sending the would-be inventor back to 1932, instead.

I wonder if Asimov wasn’t determined to pull the plug on time travel in literature once and for all. At a certain point, a member of the Allwhen Council lectures Harlan on what can happen when one meets oneself in the past. What he says is logical, but it reads like incomprehensible balderdash. It’s probably as close as Asimov ever came to humor, but I also suspect it was unintentional. Be that as it may, Asimov practically demolishes time travel even as a literary device by making it collapse of its own weight.

It does sound like the time-travel story to end all time-travel stories. And the Eternals seem bent on maintaining a status quo of their own devising. Do they accomplish anything?

Humanity’s extinction. The people of the Hidden Centuries finally develop space flight but discover that alien races have shut mankind out of the galaxy. And the human race, imprisoned on Earth with the history of dull mediocrity that the Eternals have imposed in the name of security, stagnates and dies of boredom.

So that’s the difference, then. And it’s a huge one. The Second Foundation tries to achieve its goals by action in the present. The Eternals, in contrast, control all the future, or almost. They play God by imposing their own view of order on all history at once... The ultimate fascists!

Aren’t they, though. And the reference to “playing God” is interesting. I’ve read an article on the role of religion in Asimov’s novels. It concentrates exclusively on externals. Which is a pity, because The End of Eternity is a sharp critique of a celibate — and thereby highly neurotic — secular priesthood that rigidly imposes its morality on humanity for all time to come. The irony is, of course, that the morality is supposedly “eternal” but is actually culture-bound.

I espy some toes to be stepped on here. This Allwhen Council and the Eternals wouldn’t represent a particular religious denomination, by any chance? Or even more than one? In Genesis, chapter 30, Laban is the name of a sharp operator who double-crosses and exploits his nephew Jacob. Maybe The End of Eternity wasn’t forgotten so much as dropped like a hot potato.

There may be something to that; I don’t know. One thing is sure: Asimov has drawn us a very clear picture; he doesn’t have to name names. But then neither do we: the Eternals can represent any misogynistic religion. Noÿs even alludes to the Eternals’ power as being an aphrodisiac for groupies, as it were. Or you could say the Eternals are a monopolistic corporation’s all-male board of directors who live in a “gated community” and toy with the world. They’re like Greek gods who’ve suddenly discovered good manners but remain every bit as ruthless as they ever were.

In general, then, any unaccountable, totalitarian elite. But the religious angle was nothing new for Asimov: in “Trends,” a fundamentalist theocracy represses science in the U.S.; in Pebble in the Sky, the Society of Ancients stultifies a backward planet Earth. In Foundation he rather cynically invents a Church of the Galactic Spirit just to bamboozle the barbarians...

Indeed. Asimov, of all people, knew that rationalism and religion are two different modes of thought. And he knew the dangers of mixing them. What might a rationalist religion look like? As an ardent student of history he had to know of Robespierre’s cult of the Supreme Being, and he quite obviously was not going to go there.

Who would? Asimov knows what religion can do: in The Caves of Steel, Elijah Bailey uses a story from the gospels to teach R. Daneel Olivaw — a robot and purely “rational” entity — what compassion is. However, Asimov himself said there’d be little to find in his life concerning formal religion. He also didn’t believe in the Hereafter and claimed to be quite indifferent to the concept of God, although he was very interested in religion as a historical phenomenon.

Exactly. I wonder if Asimov himself wasn’t culturally religious in a completely non-theistic, non-cultic sense. Practically his entire work owes its popularity to being a set of clear-cut rationalist morality plays.

I see... Asimov updates the 18th-century Enlightenment to the 20th century and has Hari Seldon establish what amounts to a glorified political party based on its principles. The End of Eternity, then, shows us an anti-Foundation. The Eternals are “men of little faith,” because their authoritarian control denies humanity’s authenticity; and the Eternals’ means of imposing their idea of benevolence are absurd by their very nature.

That’s strong brew, but it sums things up. In Second Foundation, Asimov himself anticipates a basic objection: a secret society is supposedly manipulating humanity. The Second Foundation has the best of intentions, but it also has something that the rest of humanity badly needs: heightened empathy, at the very least; telepathy, at most. Are the elite the only ones who count? What about the rest of us?

I’m not sure he ever really refuted that objection: the First Foundation is an open society; the Second Foundation is not. Anyway, the problem seems to be framed primarily as one of politics.

The End of Eternity does address ethics. In his usual textbook manner, Asimov draws conclusions: humanity needs help, but in the end it has to find its own way. The novel concludes with the end of “Eternity,” which is static, and the beginning of “Infinity,” which is dynamic. The novel also implicitly justifies the Second Foundation’s working within history, and it explicitly warns against a similar elite’s imposing its ideology from outside of history.

We have to be careful, though. The Eternals can’t be called a religious cult as such: they’re really a technocracy. They have no mythology and don’t concern themselves with the meaning of life or even of what they do. If anything, they’re more a cult of morality for its own sake.

Or, to make other analogies, they parody a corporate empire by suppressing inventions and producing nothing useful. Or they may be seen as a kind of police force, or even as a crime syndicate that becomes a shadow government.

That’s a little far-fetched, but the principle is correct. At the end, Noÿs calls the Eternals pathological, and Harlan realizes she’s summed them up in a word. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world...

...and lose his own soul. Which happens when power becomes an end in itself: it negates the very concept of profit. It seems to me that the Eternals have forgotten their original motivation. Speaking of which, does Hari Seldon really know why he does what he does?

It’s more or less taken for granted. Seldon is a man of action; when asked to justify his work, he never seems to find the words. And no wonder: rationalism is a methodology; it has no existential mythology, by definition.

The spiritual chronology in Asimov’s novels is a little confusing. In 1939, “Trends” fought the traditional religion-science battle. In Foundation, in 1951, Hari Seldon is only superficially reflective about himself. Three decades later he’s at least consistent: he explains his own motives fumblingly in Forward the Foundation, in 1983.

I would have respected Hari Seldon for expounding the philosophy of Spinoza, but I like him partly because he doesn’t talk like a philosopher.

Part of Asimov’s charm is his transparency: we can see his personality in his works. However, we must be careful never to confuse any author with his own characters.

Exactly right. We can talk only about the ideas and styles he gives them. Even so, there’s something intriguing: at almost the same time, in 1982, Asimov introduced a kind of immanent mysticism with the Gaia theme in Foundation’s Edge. Who knows, it might have been a first, cautious step towards transcending the unavoidable but ultimately pointless controversy between science and religion.

Or maybe his Church of the Galactic Spirit needed a revival. In any case, I can see how “the end of Eternity and the beginning of Infinity” has religious significance: Asimov himself would never have said so, but he takes history out of the hands of the Eternals and puts it back into the hands of God.

That’s one way of looking at it. Others might call it “fate,” but that implies that history is purely random chance, which Asimov would deny. “Destiny” would be more like it, because it emphasizes free will and existential choice. “God” implies destiny chosen at least in part according to certain basic principles.

I can’t say what Asimov would think, but I’d say “God” and “destiny” need each other.

They do seem to be all of a piece, don’t they? Maybe it has something to do with Noÿs’ curiously well-integrated, almost angelic character. From an Eternal’s point of view, coming from the Hidden Centuries would practically amount to descending from Heaven, or at least from a realm of people more powerful than the Eternals.

In Asimov’s novels from Pebble in the Sky to The End of Eternity, when we add up all the heroes — from Joseph Schwartz to Noÿs Lambent — who are outsiders and who sometimes have superhuman powers, we get quite a list of prophets, angels and even vaguely Messianic figures. Asimov was well on his way to creating a new kind of mythology all his own.

There is something to that, and it’s worth exploring. But some other time. Anyway, at the end of the story, Harlan and Noÿs deliberately strand themselves in a wilderness of the 20th century...

Wait... You mentioned the 1930’s, more than twenty years before Asimov began to write The End of Eternity. Harlan is from the 95th century; he meets Noÿs in the 482nd or something; and she comes from beyond the 100,000th. The range and contrast are—

Just plain ridiculous even for science fiction. The Eternals stifle progress for ten million years, long enough to give the space aliens a head start in the galactic land rush and to make humanity conclude that existence is futile. That extreme stretch between the far future and the recent past rubs our nose in something you said earlier: the important thing is what we do now, in the present. Good point.

Thank you, but I’ll preen later. Just a thought: Asimov had a life-long love affair with history. When he writes science fiction set in the future, he can pick numbers out of thin air, and nobody will notice. But when he talks about recorded history, we know he’s going to aim for painstaking accuracy. Why do Harlan and Noÿs Lambent take refuge in the year 1932, of all times? It’s right in the middle of the Great Depression. Couldn’t Asimov have chosen a more comfortable time for them?

I suspect that Asimov was making a covert political point. The year marks the beginning of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Head-smacking enlightenment! Of course! FDR brought about a social revolution that overthrew a plutocracy...

Somewhat like that of the Eternals and their monopoly.

What happens next in the story?

Harlan and Noÿs say to hell with “Eternity.” Their time kettle vanishes, leaving them free to start life anew.

Shades of Adam and Eve. Is there an apple?

I hadn’t thought of that... Yes, there is, and “Eve” really bites it: Noÿs says she’s going to write a letter to an Italian physicist that will put him on the right track to splitting the atom.

But the important thing is that Harlan, like Joseph Schwartz, has to decide who he is and what he believes in. At a dramatic turning point they both have to answer an... eternal... question: “In what do you put your faith?”

And I think Asimov’s own answer to that is admirably clear.