Today I finished Robert J. Sawyer's early novel Starplex. It's reminiscent of Star Trek, in that a coalition of aliens and humans has joined together on a starship to explore space, and seek out new life and new civilizations...
(Cue theme music.)
Halfway through the novel, time travel comes up; and we discover that one of the characters will apparently live to be ten billion years old.
Ten billion. Working on this kind of timescale takes a certain kind of bald-faced audacity on the author's part, both because the number itself is staggering and because you can't really do any kind of story over that length of time. All you can do is pick out episodes; or, as in this case, go to the end and see what's there.
Orson Scott Card did this, in his Homecoming series; it's generally understood that the Oversoul has been active for tens of millions of years since the founding of the planet Harmony. Card handles this by confronting it head-on: by having one of the characters talk about the impossibility of any kind of history handling that enormous duration. Even if there were some mega-library with the history all written down, who could live long enough to read it?
On the other hand, you have Isaac Asimov; his Galactic Empire was originally written to be fifty thousand years into the future, but Asimov retconned this into twenty thousand years later on. Why? A feeling that fifty thousand years is too long, somehow?
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