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Mar 2, 2010

Teaser Tuesday (#1)

Gohrlay looking for a robotic body.
Image Licensing.

"Your soft voice, soft words...I heard nothing, not consciously, but I remember your delicate voice whispering. About what?"

Those are two sentences from Chapter 17 of The End of Eternity, Isaac Asimov's time travel novel. The person speaking is the protagonist of the story, Andrew Harlan. In typical Asimov fashion, Andrew is trying to solve a mystery.

I've spent years trying to understand the particular puzzle that Andrew is asking about in those two sentences. I've long imagined that this kind of "loose end" might have eventually motivated Asimov to write a sequel to The End of Eternity. Unfortunately, Asimov was taken from us before he had a chance to complete his Foundation Saga. Well, who says it can ever be complete?

It falls upon we who are uneasy about the way Asimov left his fictional universe to carry on. I've been working on a fan fiction sequel to The End of Eternity that firmly places Andrew Harlan inside the same fictional universe as the Foundation...as long as you accept Asimov's idea that a universe can contain multiple Realities...and Eternities.

Asimov did a wonderful thing by populating his Foundation Saga with a smattering of robots, particularly the telepathic Daneel. It becomes an enjoyable exercise to guess how Asimov might have imagined a role for mentalics in the events he wrote about in The End of Eternity. How can Andrew "hear" a voice, but not hear it consciously? I'm putting my answer to that question into The Start of Eternity...additional authors are always welcome in this collaborative fiction writing project.

"Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme." See MizB

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