Diabolus ex machina

Which of these makes it onto the evening news?

1) bus crashes and children are rushed to the hospital
2) bus driver avoids collision and arrives safely at the destination

For the same reasons, the plots of many science fiction stories are full of bad news and bad breaks. A thousand years ago, if you wanted to torment your hero and build suspense you called a snake-like beast in from casting and let the battle begin. These days the diabolus ex machina is more likely to arrive from the depths of space just in time to ruin the hero's day.

I often criticize the science fiction genre for widespread lack of imagination about aliens (most recently here). Isaac Asimov ignored aliens in much of his later writing, although when he first started trying to sell short stories he wrote about things like Martians who had sex with humans and produced hybrid children.

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The Start of Eternity is a kind of fan fiction sequel to to Asimov's time travel novel, The End of Eternity. While trying to pay tribute to Asimov, I find myself sending aliens half way across the universe to smash Galaxia, Asimov's vision of humanity's future.

Have I turned into what I dislike: someone willing to turn aliens into my evil henchmen? Hardly. Asimov painted himself into a corner by inventing Galaxia and leaving his Foundation Series and Robot Stories hanging, incomplete. I'm personally providing a deus ex machina that can lift Asimov out of the corner and allow fans to continue the Asimov adventures that we are so fond of. I'm willing to take criticism for what I'm doing to Asimov's fictional universe, but I don't think my plot elements are too devilishly mean or too magically helpful, either.

As I've previously discussed, I'm not a fan of a dichotomy between good and evil. I never sit down and say, "Hmm, I need to make a good (or evil) character."

Foundations of Eternity

The aliens in The Start of Eternity are not evil. Actually, I'm concerned that some readers will accuse me of using aliens as a kind of deus ex machina. I just finished writing a description of the First Contact between the Huaoshy and the Retair. It is the alien equivalent of the story about the first two automobiles in Kansas crashing into each other.

I'm interested in why some people are willing to believe very crazy ideas, but they object to some plots and start shouting, "Deus ex machina!" The Retair are a species that evolved as a kind of flightless bird. They first appear in Chapter 10 of The Start of Eternity and by Chapter 13 they are in need of a helping hand. If you think that help arrives too magically then go ahead and click "edit".

Image at the top of this blog post: Aliens as devils: Alien Pumpkin by dalangalma.

Related Reading: horror, science fiction, good and evil.

                              Foundations of Eternity

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Eternal Perspective

There are several online reviews and essays about Isaac Asimov's time travel novel The End of Eternity; one the longest is by Don Webb in Bewildering Stories.

About a year and a half ago I started acting on the crazy idea that it might be fun to write a sequel to The End of Eternity. I started calling that sequel The Start of Eternity. There are some past blog posts (see also the blog posts listed at the bottom of this page) about how I view The End of Eternity as an integral part of Asimov's "future history" of robots and the Foundation.

Don Webb wrote this about The End of Eternity: "It has no robots, no Galactic Empire, and no Foundations." However, Asimov linked The End of Eternity to the rest of his "future history" in his novel Foundation's Edge. Asimov wrote that robots created Eternity and used time travel to make it possible for humans to take over the entire galaxy. If we accept Asimov's suggestion that Eternity was a tool used by robots to fulfill the demands of the Zeroth Law then we can imagine that robots were lurking, unseen, in the background of The End of Eternity.

One of the remarkable features of Asimov's robots such as Daneel Olivaw is that they have telepathic powers. Don Webb says flatly that telepathy does not appear at all in The End of Eternity. However, Asimov wrote into The End of Eternity the idea that telepathy was used to introduce into Andrew Harlan's mind the idea that Cooper the Cub was really Vikkor Mallansohn. If so, then we can imagine telepathic robots who created Eternity, used it as a means to travel back and forth through Earth's history and then, ultimately, used Harlan (and Noÿs Lambent) as the means to end Eternity.

Andrew and Noÿs travel back in time to the 1930s and engineer a Reality Change that starts humanity on the path towards the Galactic Empire that is described in the Foundation novels. We must view Andrew and Noÿs as the puppets of telepathic robots who have decided that Eternity and time travel are a dead end for humanity.

If you look carefully in the image at the top of this blog post, you can get a glimpse of a telepathic robot named Rycleu, one of the secret masters of Eternity who meets with Andrew and Noÿs in the first chapter of The Start of Eternity and helps them alter the course of technological developments on Earth, allowing humans on Earth to start manufacturing positronic robots in the 20th century.

Image. The image at the top of this blog post is from the first chapter of The Start of Eternity. For image credits see this page.