This is a brilliant, unique approach to time travel fiction, though I’d expect nothing less from Isaac Asimov. Nearly every other time travel story involves a device that allows travel to occur — and I guess in a way this one does too, but it refers to a capsule almost like an elevator, which allows the rider to go “up-when” and “down-when,” up to hundreds of centuries in the future. But most of the story takes place in “eternity,” a never clearly defined state outside of time, where councils decide when to intervene in the past to correct history, so that bad things never happen. (In every other time travel story I can think of, this is explicitly forbidden–they’re trying not to alter history because they don’t want everything upstream to shift to accommodate it. Asimov gets around this by creating an “eternity” where those who do the tinkering are removed from their own eras specifically because they’re relatively inconsequential to the timeline — no families, no children, little impact if they’re extracted–and from “eternity,” they get to play God.)
Andrew Harlan is one of these, sent by his superiors into a century far in the past, compared to the century he’s from. There he falls in love, and all his priorities change. Eternals are not allowed to marry or to procreate. He takes his woman (Noys) from her century, hides her far up-when, and conspires to hide her in the past, where he can vanish with her too and live a normal life. But then he discovers that he plays a pivotal role in the construction of eternity in the first place–and his higher-ups seem to discover his secret. When they threaten Noys, Andrew leverages his position and in turn threatens all eternity, unless they let him have his way.
While there are a lot of components that individually can be confusing, I found that I didn’t have to attend to every detail of the story. Asimov deliberately sketched the mechanics of time travel in broad strokes, and my imagination filled in the fuzzy details well enough that I didn’t get hung up on them. There’s a twist ending I didn’t quite see coming. Very cleverly written.
My rating: ****
Language: none
Violence: none
Sexual content: present, but in a fade-to-black kind of way
Political content: none
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