The End of Eternity

Apart from that hogwash of an ending, I really enjoyed reading this book. I don't mean the ending was bad, ending was technically good but inner pessimist in me absolutely loathes such a wholesome ending. But if I keep filtering out books from my reading list that contains tiniest bit of positiveness in it, I'll be left with only Albert Camus and the like.

I am yet to read this book but its very small book i bought it for 260 rs .. it has small fonts and bad paper quality ..... But its Asimov book we cant complain , story should be good

small font and poor quality paper

An Early Asimov Effort - he wrote better later. You’ll never guess the twist in the tail!

My first reaction to The End of Eternity as soon as I finished the book was one of discomfort with its many flaws. I instantly ranked it as one of Asimov's minor works for the reasons I describe below. But as I let my thoughts about the book settle down, I started enjoying it more and more, and finally concluded it is a quite important piece in Asimov's complex universe, especially after revisiting Foundation's Edge and finding in it a direct reference to Eternity and Eternals and how these help explain why in the Reality of the Galactic Empire, the whole universe is only inhabitted by human beings--not by chance but by careful selection made by the Eternals among the infinite possible Realities. I'm always learning more about how Asimov managed to connect all of his books in a single context, which is not a small task considering how prolific he had been. And in the particular case of EoE this is even more of an accomplishment, as the themes here are much more apart from the thematic environs of the Robot and Foundation series.Still, there are many plot holes and logic loopholes in this book that are difficult to digest. The way Asimov describes how Time is structured and can be manipulated is somehow undeveloped if not primitive, especially if compared with shorter but much more compelling stories like Heinlein's "All You Zombies--", Borges's "The Garden of Forking Paths" or even PKD's "Adjustment Team". Those, imho, are much more interesting stories about time travel and time paradoxes, even though Asimov as well strived to enrich his story with time paradoxes. The whole concept of time manipulation, which is central to the very existence of Eternity, seemed fragile to me. Eternity appears in the beginning of the book as something monastic, just like Castalia in Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game (and Andrew Harlan becoming Twissell's pupil reminded me of Josef Knecht befriending Father Jacobus, which initially seemed quite promising). But later on, the plot moves towards a time paradox not much different from John Connor's sending his father Kyle Reese back in time in Terminator (a kind of paradox that is much more thrilling in Robert Heinlein's "All You Zombies--"). The time travel rules in EoE seem not to resist a more careful logical scrutiny either, and even after lifting the veil of verisimilitude I found myself stopping and thinking: "wait a minute, this does not fit into the rest of the picture because…"Asimov's simple and sometimes even clumsy writing style also shows in EoE. His limited and somewhat amateurish style makes this book sound very much like a low-budget sci-fi movie. For instance, the extensive use of dialog to convey details of the plot, which is only annoying in Foundation, here in EoE gets to the point of even being comical, particularly when Twissell speaks. He, who is described as gnome-like, immediately seemed to me like Mel Brooks as Yogurt in Spaceballs. All that becomes even more salient in this book because Asimov really strives to enrich Andrew Harlan's character with a more complex personality than usual (he is, indeed, an above-average emotionally complex character to Asimov's standards): there are many vivid descriptions of Harlan's dreams, and even a direct quote from the Bible: Proverbs 28:1, but all that seems to miss its purpose in a loose, awkward way.The trouble is that Harlan's inner motivations are key to make the whole plot move on, and they were not convincing to me. The incentives seemed all wrong. Although many dystopian sci-fi stories use romance to crack the rigidity of the system, here in EoE Harlan's obsession for Noÿs is almost caricature-like. Harlan's incentives lack weight, and that is rather disappointing because I can see how much effort Asimov has dedicated to make them credible. Even the plot twist at the end, which attempts to redeem Noÿs's futility, is not enough to move the needle, imho.Notwithstanding all that, I remain a big Asimov fan. So even here in EoE, where things don't seem to add up, the connection with Foundation's Edge is more than enough to make me view the whole novel from a different, maybe more indulgent perspective. Asimov's style is in many instances shaky and precarious, the plot may have loopholes and its logic may be flawed, but as in the case of the weakest parts of Foundation here again I end up forgiving it all in favor of the strength of Asimov's whole, impressive corpus.

I'd forgotten that Asimov actually learned how to write. Having most recently read his original Foundation books and I, Robot I was expecting successive scenes with one person talking to another about ideas. Instead we get a high-concept mystery thriller with a complex narrative structure. It's almost a noir SF novel, with a hero disintegrating under pressure as convincingly as any Simenon or Highsmith central character.The Eternals, a near-monastic organization that lives outside regular time, are like the Time Lords except that instead of standing aloof they constantly tinker with alterations to the course of history. I liked that because usually these organizations set great store by preserving the "original" timeline spawned by random events. This policy of active interference proves to be a major plot point.Time travel novels always require the writer to set up some rules. It's the nature of the genre that those rules may not hold up if you scrutinize them too closely, but at one point Asimov seems to forget his own rules anyhow. He has an alteration in Reality change some old magazines stored in Eternity (the zone outside time where the Eternals live). Yet the whole point of the novel up till now is that if a person is brought into Eternity then they are unaffected by changes to their original timeline. If that weren't so, the Eternals themselves would be a constant risk of disappearing. The protagonist even uses this rule to protect a non-Eternal from the effects of a change in their century. So the magazines should have been brought into Eternity after the change -- yet Asimov says that the pages physically alter every time a change is made outside Eternity, violating his own rule.That aside, I liked it a lot. You might find the the all-male nature of Eternity contrived and a bit dated (in The Machine Stops fifty years earlier, Forster assumed the far future would have just as many leading women as leading men) but that's no different from the all-male college of magicians in Earthsea, say. (Although admittedly something like that makes more sense in fantasy than in SF, which we expect to abide by other rules than just the author's.) Anyway, bear with that as Asimov is fully aware of it and we discover that he's not propounding this as the natural and inevitable state of all human organizations.

I have been an Asimov fan since the middle of the last century. This is a stunning tour de force of imagination and storytelling.

Enjoyed the story. Good characters, interesting premise, advanced technologies and complex relationships. I was very surprised by the way it concluded