The End Of Eternity Asimov Pdf
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The End of Eternity By Isaac Asimov Paperback, 256 pages Orb Books List Price: $15.99 Science-fiction godfather Isaac Asimov published his classic time-travel novel The End of Eternity in 1955, and in a way, it's become lost in time itself over the years. Overshadowed by Asimov's famous Foundation and Robot series, The End of Eternity is mostly unknown to casual science-fiction fans. Yet serious devotees of Asimov's work consider it to be his single greatest novel. The End of Eternity has been out of print and hard to find for a while, but that's been happily remedied with Tor Books' recent hardcover reissue and even more recent move to the various e-book formats. The complicated plot of the book goes something like this: Our hero, Andrew Harlan, is an Eternal — a scientist operating from a tract of cosmic real estate known as Eternity. Eternity is a sort of bubble that exists outside of time and space.
Or, in the metaphorical approach of the book, it's like an extratemporal elevator shaft running parallel to forward-moving Time. Eternals can move up and down this shaft — 'upwhen' and 'downwhen' — getting off at stations in any century to enact Reality Changes. These changes alter the flow of human events toward outcomes producing 'the maximum good for the maximum number.' As a going concern, though, Eternity has an HR problem. Despite their names, Eternals are mere humans, subject to aging in 'physiotime.' They age and die just like anyone else. They make mistakes.
And fall in love. Disclosing too much after this would spoil things, as much of the pleasure of Eternity comes from its old-fashioned mystery plotting. This might not be what you'd expect from Asimov, but the author actually wrote several mysteries and was a member of the prestigious Sherlock Holmes appreciation society, 'The Baker Street Irregulars.'
The End Of Eternity Game
Isaac Asimov was born in Belarus in 1920 and moved to Brooklyn with his family at the age of 3. He worked as a professor of biochemistry at Boston University and won numerous science-fiction awards for his writing. Hulton Archive/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Hulton Archive/Getty Images Eternity's essential mission statement, after all, would have to be read as social engineering writ insanely large. What would actually happen, the book asks, if an eternal guardian entity were forever shielding us from our own mistakes?
It doesn't take too much lateral thinking to transpose Asimov's hard sci-fi musings into theological notions of destiny and free will. Or, going in the other direction, to matters of evolution and natural selection. If you remove adverse environmental conditions, would man keep evolving at all? This is part of Asimov's particular genius. He is a master prestidigitator of notional misdirection. He keeps you so dazzled with the sci-fi flourishes — Temporal loops! Neuronic whips!
— that you don't notice the bigger cosmic tricks he's producing from his other sleeve. It's a maneuver he uses time and time again in the Foundation and Robot books. Eternity also works as a futuristic thriller and is particularly effective as a straight-up mystery novel. The last 30 pages of the book move with terrific velocity through a series of startling revelations. Asimov snaps together a dozen story elements cleverly obscured throughout the other chapters. Clearly, this is where Asimov's Sherlock habit pays off. Glenn McDonald is an arts writer and movie critic with the Raleigh News & Observer and editor of NPR's Wait, Wait.
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ΤΕΛΟΣ ΤΗΣ ΑΙΩΝΙΟΤΗΤΑΣ ΑΡΧΗ ΤΟΥ ΑΠΕΙΡΟΥ. Μυθιστορηματική γαλαξιακή παραδοξολογία του 'χρόνου' που σε συγκλονίζει.
Η επιτομή της επιστημονικής εξωφρενικής έμπνευσης, η αιωνιότητα με τις απαραίτητες αλλαγές πραγματικότητας, οι 'Αιώνιοι',που πράττουν με εγωιστική τεχνητή νοημοσύνη και αλλάζουν την ιστορία του γαλαξία με απρόσμενες συνέπειες. Το καλύτερο βιβλίο επιστημονικής φαντασίας που έχω διαβάσει ως τώρα!!
Ποτέ δεν ήμουν οπαδός της τετράγωνης λογικής,των μαθηματικών,της χρονικής μηχανικής και των εξισώσεων μηχανικού πεδίου που οδηγούν σε τοποχρονικές συγκινήσεις.(μόνο που τα γράφω πληγώνω τα αισθήματα μου). Παρόλα αυτά,ο τεράστιος Ισαάκ Ασίμωφ είχε θεϊκή επίδραση στο αναγνωστικό μου πεδίο. Με συγκλόνισε με τις τόσο ελκυστικά αληθοφανείς επιστημονικές ιδέες. Σαν να μου χάρισε για κάποια βράδια που κάναμε παρέα μια εξελιγμένη τεχνητή νοημοσύνη για να καταφέρω να παρακολουθήσω την αρχιτεκτονική του αφήγηση για το τέλος της αιωνιότητας. Με ξενάγησε απο αιώνα σε αιώνα ανεβοκατεβαίνοντας εκατομμύρια χρόνια μπρος-πίσω με απίστευτη εγκεφαλική δόμηση κατανόησης και γυρίσματα πλοκής και φαντασίας. Γνώρισα οικείους και αληθινούς χαρακτήρες ηρώων με πάθη και λάθη παρά την επιστημονική τους κατάρτιση.
Εμαθα για τον προγραμματισμό άνωχρονικών και κατωχρονικών εγκλημάτων με μικρομονάδες υπολογισμού απο τον Κομπιούταπλεξ της Αιωνιότητας. Και σαν ένα όνειρο που κρατάει παραπάνω απο ότι χρειάζεται,πέρασα με αρκετή φρίκη και δυσπιστία σε αναλυση συναισθηματικής δομής,δράση,αντίδραση, παρατήρηση,σκέψη και συγκίνηση,απο τον Πρωτόγονο Άνθρωπο του 21ου αιώνα στους ανώτερους ανθρώπους του ανωχρόνου των Κρυμμένων Αιώνων.
Μη φανταστείτε πως στους Κρυμμένους Αιώνες ζουν αόρατα υπέρπλάσματα. Οι άνθρωποι που ελέγχουν το περιβάλλον τους δεν εξελίσσονται.
Στους Κρυμμένους Αιώνες ( δεν ξέρω ποιοι ειναι, κρύβονται καλά) ζουν κανονικοί άνθρωποι,HOMO SAPIENS. Και κάπως έτσι,με απλή τετράγωνη μαθηματική λογική,(ανατρίχιασα). Ο μετανάστης με τις φαβορίτες και τον κοκκάλινο σκελετό γίνεται χωρίς Δεύτερη σκέψη, η Πρώτη μου Αγάπη και Παντοτινή στην κατηγορία ΕΦ. Κάπως έτσι,σαν την αρχή του απείρου. Καλή ανάγνωση!! Άπειρους ασπασμούς!!
I've always felt that Isaac Asimov writes brilliant science fiction with boring characters. I love a good time travel story, mostly to see what this author's take on the usual time travel paradoxes will be. Anyone who writes about agents changing history has to explain how they deal with things like the Grandfather Paradox, meeting earlier or later versions of yourself, and so on. There are a handful of well-known ways to deal with these issues (alternate timelines, a deterministic universe, special laws of temporal physics, etc.) and Asimov is rather inventive in using several of them at once. Although The End of Eternity is brilliant in its construction of a civilization of time travelers and all the history and technology that goes into their society and the way they meddle with time, his protagonists are basically a bunch of whiny geeks who've never kissed a girl and act like highly-educated chimpanzees fighting for the highest branch in the treehouse.
Asimov's vision of a civilization that spans millions of years and thousands of realities doesn't include a single one where women become scientists and engineers and might join the Eternals' boys' club. The entire plot hinges on not one but two high-ranking Eternals who decide they are willing to throw all of reality into danger for the chance to get laid. I know Asimov was a nerd and he wrote this in the 1950s, but he still could have done better. It's like the idea of women as anything but sex objects to be coveted or to seduce men off the path of Righteous Scientific Objectivity just never occurred to him. So naturally when a girl shows up (the only female character in the entire book), she must spell T-R-O-U-B-L-E, and in this case, the end of Eternity. I enjoyed the story, but Asimov has never been my favorite among the Grand Old Masters of science fiction; there is something just a little too cold and calculating in all of his stories.
For the ideas and the plot twists, this is a fun book with a great premise, but don't expect Asimov to wow you with his nuanced grasp of human relationships. His characters are wire dummies to hang a story on. If you haven't read Asimov's SF classic, it's one of those time-travel stories where you can change the past. The people with the time machines are a shadowy, infinitely powerful organisation called the Eternals. They flit around in time, changing things 'for the good of humanity'.
Except that, as I'm sure you already guessed, it isn't quite clear after a while that humanity is benefiting from all this attention. The agents who are responsible for making the changes are called Technicians, and they pride themselves on always finding the very simplest way to effect the change. They don't start a war if it's enough just to assassinate one key person; they don't assassinate him if it's enough just to organise a traffic accident so that he misses a meeting; and they don't organise the traffic accident if it's enough just to put his address book in a different pocket, so that he makes the critical phone call twenty minutes too late. In a word, they're minimalists.
I was talking about this book the other day with an American friend who'd also read it. If the premise of the story really were true, we wondered what evidence you could find to suggest that Eternals had been at work. We couldn't help thinking that the 2000 Butterfly Ballot was suspicious. Not least the name - perhaps some Technician had been unable to resist the joke, and planted a larger clue than he really was supposed to? After posting this review and that for The Naked Sun, I did some more googling on the background to Eternity. Among other things, I discovered that Asimov claimed he got the original idea when he saw an ad in an early 30s newspaper, showing a picture that looked rather like a mushroom cloud.
Sci-Fi
Well, he thought to himself, no one in 1930 knew what a mushroom cloud looked like. Maybe it's a message from a stranded time-traveller? And, from that beginning, he constructed the rest of the novel.
I liked it, but I was dubious about the reliability of the method. Time travel probably won't be invented very soon - it sounds like extremely advanced technology. If you really did want to send a message into the distant future, you'd want something far more permanent and noticeable than an obscure ad. Something, in fact, that would have a decent chance of surviving for thousands of years, in unchanged form, and which would be as prominent as possible. The ideal thing would be an immortal work of art.
Isaac Asimov
And then it struck me: in a different thread, we'd been talking about Shakespeare's mysterious Sonnet XVIII. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit to your august consideration the hypothesis that this is a message from a time-traveller who crashed their machine in the early 17th century. To start off with, the poem explicitly says that its central purpose is to be remembered for ever. It's so beautiful, and every word is so perfectly chosen, that it has a decent chance of surviving unchanged for thousands of years - maybe, even until people get around to inventing time travel? If you want to turn this into a short story, please credit me somewhere:).