Harlan’s Ordered World – Review of Eternity’s End

Objectivity and distance above all!

The protagonist of Eternity’s End , Andrew Harlan, is a Technician, the person responsible for making changes in human history. The aim of his work is to determine the minimum shift necessary to redirect the fate of the world on new tracks and its far-reaching effects. You know, sometimes some people will disappear completely, others will lead a different life than in the base timeline, maybe unhappy, maybe more interesting. It doesn’t matter – what counts is the sum of the final gains, the cumulative good, peace and order.

The concept of a history-healing institution made me automatically skeptical: here is a bunch of men, an order of sorts, measuring and calculating Minimum Changes to determine the most optimal, happiest state of human existence over time. They prevent wars, eliminate social problems, remove extremism. From time to time, even they can’t do anything about “some odd” social arrangements, but give them a moment, maybe they’ll iron it out. As befits a serious institution, Eternity is celibate, hierarchical, and utter, unemotional objectivity. Plus, there are political wars going on, and the guys don’t disdain technological espionage, but it’s for a higher purpose! We look at all this from the perspective of Harlan, a person who believes in the mission of gradually correcting the world, deeply convinced that

In fact, reading The End of Eternity , imbued with a kind of holiness of a character suspicious of any otherness, rigid and conservative, was not very pleasant. The novel is almost entirely immersed in this tone of emotional distance and almost Kafkaesque bureaucracy. At some point, you may even doubt whether we are dealing with some too early, unfinished work of Asimov. I hasten to point out that it is not, and the reader and Harlan are in for a major twist. It comes late, so you can grumble about how the story structure is balanced.

Novel in time

From the perspective of the whole, The End of Eternity is an intriguing voice on free choice and the benefit of doubts that are too often suppressed even by people with all the competence to contest dogmas or mindless observance of rules. It’s a dystopia that criticizes conservatism, and for today’s reader, maybe even patriarchy. Finally, it can also be treated as a bildungsroman , while the adolescent character, typical of this genre, has a problem with the prolonged moratorium, because he is already in his thirties. Which, again, in the early 21st century, may steer the reader towards new, very current readings of this classic novel.

The Time Machine series collects just such texts – classic, but open to new readings, so at least in some aspect still relevant. When writing about The Last Shore , I mentioned that the translations of these books also have their own history. The End of Eternity was translated into Polish by Adam Kaska, whom you already know from The Martian Chronicles or The Great Gatsby . His version of Asimov perfectly captures the author’s distinctive style, which we experience in all its glory at The Foundation: rather technical, sometimes even dry, realistic and “objective”. He extracts dialogues from the narrative very well, which may not be many, but they add emotion and dynamics to the whole. This way of writing fantasy has always seemed to me typical of its golden age, when the authors tried to surround their visions of humanity with the greatest possible realism and set them in a clear technological background. Undoubtedly, the language of Lem and the translations from the 1960s play a huge role in this, so to a large extent simply the way of communication of the Polish intelligentsia of that time. There are certain flavors associated with this, which today may seem like awkwardness or controversial translation choices, and result from the jargon of the time. For example, “calculator” appears here as the name of a profession or person, which should not surprise you if you recall, for example,Hidden activities and people in the profession of computer , “computer”, i.e. data analytics.

The End of Eternity is a good novel, intriguing and challenging for the reader, starting with how to properly treat its bureaucratic and conservative tone. It is an exercise in doubt, in distrust of the narrator. And at the same time a very good introduction to Asimov, which does not oblige you to read the entire series of novels, but only to look at the story of one Technician for the correction of the fate of humanity.