Timescales in Science Fiction

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?

What I Got From Amazon Recently...

Two things.

Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare- which I read in the library, a long time ago, and only vaguely remembered. I wanted to compare it to Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

Asimov focuses much more on historical background than Bloom does; especially in the history plays, he often neglects the plays themselves to discuss what really happened, and how Shakespeare got it wrong or right. This can get frustrating; but it's very informative, and after all, with Bloom I've already got an in-depth look at the plays from a literary perspective.

That arrived yesterday. Today's arrival was Illegal Alien, an early Robert J. Sawyer novel about a first alien contact turned into a murder mystery.

I'm a big Sawyer fan, so I'm going to have to delve into it.

Embarrassing Non-Arrival of the Day: I misread a banner advertisement for the latest Harry Potter novel, and wandered around for ten minutes looking for copies. So it's due out in July. Hmmph.