Remembering the Adelines

April 18, 2021 / Rick Ellrod / 4 Comments

Adeline and Adaline

One of the functions of imagination is to make odd, sometimes random connections. In this case, the random connection is between two very different stories about women with almost the same name. The “Addie” in V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020) is Adeline, a young girl of the seventeenth century who becomes immortal—at a price. In the 2015 movie The Age of Adaline, the titular Adaline is also immortal, for entirely different reasons. Yet both face certain issues that resonate particularly well with us today.

Addie’s Dark Deal

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, cover

Addie LaRue doesn’t set out to become immortal. A village girl in seventeenth-century France, she wants to avoid being shunted into an unwanted marriage that will trap her in this small country backwater, isolated from the larger world she longs to know. Although she’s cautioned by her eccentric mentor never to deal with the gods that come out after sunset, Addie incautiously promises her soul to a Darkness in return for freedom from these entanglements.

This supernatural entity grants her wish in a way that’s as tricky and cruel as any fairy-tale curse. Addie will be free of entrapment because everyone she meets will forget her once they’re out of her presence. She won’t die or change until she willingly gives up her unremembered life; but she can form no lasting relationships.

Addie’s family fails to recognize her when she returns to the village. A good Samaritan who’s convinced to help her forgets about it as soon as she leaves to bring food, and never returns. If she pays in advance for a room, the innkeeper has forgotten the payment next time they meet. Addie is, of course, prevented from explaining her predicament to anyone, even if they would believe her.

Much of the story takes place in the present day, where we meet Addie living by her wits from moment to moment, as she has for three hundred years. While the wish gone wrong is a classic fairy-tale trope, this is not a fairy tale; it’s more like science fiction. Schwab does an amazing job of showing us the logical ramifications of the curse and how a highly sympathetic character copes with them.

Then the ground shifts when Addie meets a young man in a bookstore who—somehow—does remember her name. This leads to a haunting illustration of human life and how we live it that, as a perceptive book review notes, is hard to forget.

The Perpetual Reboot

No one can remember Adeline from one meeting to the next—even a lover waking up in the morning. In this respect, her situation resembles what we find in other stories that deal with memory issues, or with repeating circumstances that only the main character can recall. Bill Murray’s character Phil Connors in Groundhog Day (1993) finds himself with a similar problem: when he finally wants to form a permanent relationship with the woman he’s falling in love with, the permanence is all on his side. He has to win her affection again every day.

The same result occurs, from an opposite cause, in the movie 50 First Dates (2004). Lucy Whitmore, the girl Henry Roth becomes interested in, has suffered a traumatic short-term memory defect: she remembers her life up to the date of the accident, but each night she forgets everything that’s happened after that time. Her family and friends find ways to cope with this—but she knows them from before. Henry, who wants to get to know her, has no previous relationship to build on. Like Phil, he has to ingratiate himself with her—court her—each day anew.

Addie’s case is harder. No one remembers her from day to day; she is prevented from making any permanent mark on the world. But the hardest part is similar. She can form no lasting relationships. The essential loneliness of the main character is each case is what makes the stories so poignant.

In that respect, there’s a similarity to Diana Wynne Jones’s eerie story The Homeward Bounders (1981). Jamie, the narrator there, is condemned to wander from one alternate world to another whenever a “move” is made by supernatural players who game with human lives. Like Addie, he can’t be killed or seriously harmed—but he can never find a home. “You wouldn’t believe how lonely you get” (chapters 2, 14).

Adaline’s Accidental Immortality

In contrast to the stories mentioned above, which mostly depend on fantasy tropes of one sort or another to set up the situation, The Age of Adaline is straight science fiction—though it’s not advertised as a “science fiction movie.” A voice-over narrator explains to us that when Adaline Bowman, born in 1908, falls into a freezing lake in 1937 and then is revived by a lightning strike, the “principle of electron compression in DNA,” which will be discovered in 2035, causes her to stop aging.

This fact only gradually becomes apparent to her. We see it through a narrative sequence that jumps back and forth in time, just as in Addie LaRue. As her birth date recedes, but she does not visibly age, people look at her more and more oddly—say, in a traffic stop where the policeman examines the date on her driver’s license. Eventually the FBI takes an interest. Adaline escapes and begins changing her identity every so often to conceal her real age.

Adaline’s situation resembles that of the long-lived “Howard Family” members in Heinlein’s classic novel Methuselah’s Children (1941, 1958). She lives a perpetual “masquerade.” She is not quite so deprived of permanence as Addie; she can live for a while in a given identity, build up a bank account, buy a home. Ultimately, however, she has to keep moving. Her problem is in a way the opposite of Addie’s: Adaline needs to keep from being remembered (by the wrong people).

But this deprives her of long-term relationships just as in Addie’s and Phil’s cases. We see Adaline’s (latest) dog die, reminding her that she will outlive anyone. Her first husband died young, before her immortality began; for her, love means growing old together—but she can’t have that. Becoming involved with an “ephemeral” can only lead to tragedy in the end.

As a result, Adaline shies away from long-term commitments. It is too emotionally wrenching for her to confront the fate reluctantly embraced at one point by Lazarus Long, one of Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children characters, who does marry a short-lived ordinary human in “The Tale of the Adopted Daughter.” But Adaline finds the lack of such relationships more and more a grief as time goes on. As a character who’s learned her secret tells her (at 1:27): “All these years you’ve lived, but you never had a life.”

Reaching for Continuity

The long lives of Addie and Adaline have their compensations. For example, by living for so many years as a youthful adult, one builds up a sizable store of skills. Addie knows many languages; so does Adaline. Phil in Groundhog Day becomes a whiz at the piano by taking a one-hour lesson on each of his innumerable repeating days. Adaline can win a game of Trivial Pursuit; she also seems to a friend to drive like a maniac—but she can do this safely, since she’s had more experience than any professional race-car driver and still has the reflexes of a 29-year-old.

But these pragmatic advantages aren’t worth the isolation they must endure. Not the inability to connect—but the inability to forge a permanent connection, as we see in the desperate moments at the end of a cycle in several of these stories. At one point, Addie reflects:

Sure, she dreams of sleepy mornings over coffee, legs draped across a lap, inside jokes and easy laughter, but those comforts come with the knowing. There can be no slow build, no quiet lust, intimacy fostered over days, weeks, months. (p. 100)

We are fond of admiring the freshness of love’s beginning: most romances stick to the courtship stage. But we may not be as attentive to the charms of continuity. At p. 171, the one man who can remember Addie calls her his “date”:

Date. The word thrills through her. A date is something made, something planned; not a chance of opportunity, but time set aside at one point for another, a moment in the future.

In an article about the fast-moving changes in our culture, a recent article in Wired observes:

. . . what most of us long for, whether we realize it or not, is continuity – the sense that our lives are part of an ongoing narrative that began before we were born and will continue after we die. (Meghan O’Gieblyn, “Cloud Support: Am I Obligated to Join TikTok?”, Wired, March 2021, p. 25)

Age of Adaline: It's not the same when there's no growing old together.

We want to be remembered, to be held dear, to make a mark on the world. The burden with which Addie grapples is the inability to achieve those things.

We honor freedom, the ability to be unconstrained by the past; and that is both true and good. But that value too can be taken to an extreme. Addie LaRue serves as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the absolutism of freedom. The “god” who cursed her says jeeringly:

You asked for freedom. There is no greater freedom than that. You can move through the world unhindered. Untethered. Unbound. (p. 149)

What we want, as ever, is the happy medium—or, to put it differently, to have our cake and also eat it. We are willing to expend our freedom to make commitments in relationships, even though this necessarily involves giving hostages to fate—we can always lose the ones we love. We do this because it’s the only way we can achieve other good things: “inside jokes and easy laughter,” shared memories, the comfort and the pride of a relationship seasoned over many years.

Not remembering can be a problem; being remembered too well can be a problem too (as we are keenly aware in these days when the Internet preserves all our youthful indiscretions forever). The ways in which these two Ad(e/a)lines respond to memory, and seek after continuity, are well worth a look as we employ the freedoms and build the permanences of our lives.

Little Did I Know

March 7, 2021March 7, 2021 / Rick Ellrod / 9 Comments

Foreshadowing

Stories vary in how they hint at what’s to come. “Foreshadowing” provides the reader with more or less vague clues about things that will happen later on. As the Wikipedia article notes, even the title of a chapter or an entire work can give us such a hint. (I once changed the title of a novel—House of Stars, currently seeking a publisher—because the original working title gave away too much of the plot.)

One particularly overt way of foreshadowing is to have the narrator tell us straight out about something they didn’t find out until later. I think of this as the “little did I know” trope, based on the hackneyed formula for introducing such a hint in old-time books. That method strikes me as rather heavy-handed, and I’m dubious about whether it’s really a good idea.

”I Was Soon To Find That Out”

A classic example occurs in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). Mentor-figure Jubal Harshaw (not the titular Martian), as a side business, ghost-writes the kind of ‘confessional’ novels popular in the early twentieth century. Every now and then in Stranger, he’s motivated to dictate a bit of purple prose for such a tale. So in ch. 17 (p. 157 in my battered old paperback copy), we hear, as part of the opening for “I Married a Martian”: “In those carefree childhood days I did not dream to what strange bittersweet fate my tomboy ambition would . . .”

The fragmentary example is classic because it’s supposed to be a sample of hack writing; Harshaw is contemptuous of the potboilers he turns out. Of course, not every “little did I know” example needs to be so trite.

Romantic suspense novels are given to this trope, since a primary purpose of the foreshadowing is to build anticipation and suspense. For example, Elizabeth Peters was a master of the witty, light-hearted romantic suspense story. In Summer of the Dragon (1979), we see a whole series of such hints.

It was like a game.
But it wasn’t a game, and I was soon to find that out.” (ch. 7, p. 150)

I know now what it was that woke me at the crack of dawn next morning; but at the time I was amazed at myself. (ch. 9, p. 181)

Every passing moment made me more and more uneasy; it was as if some part of my mind knew something awful was about to happen, something I couldn’t prevent. (ch. 9, p. 194)

The fact is, my compassion was stupid. I didn’t know how stupid until it was almost too late (ch. 10, p. 213)

If I believed in premonitions I would claim that I knew the next day was going to see some sort of climax. Since I don’t believe in them, I will only claim I was nervous. (ch. 11, p. 249)

“My second impulse canceled the first; and I still maintain, in spite of what resulted, that it was a rational decision.” (almost at very end: ch. 12, p. 285)

After being hit over the head repeatedly with such ominous notes, one feels they’ve begun to lose their effectiveness. And, although the individual lines are well written, the cumulative effect is to give the story a sort of “pulp” atmosphere. In fact, that may have been just what the author was going for. (Her laugh-out-loud description of the cover of a Gothic romance at the beginning of The Camelot Caper shows that she knew exactly what she was poking fun at.)

Some authors are particularly fond of this technique. Andrew Greeley, for example, regularly warns us that something bad’s going to happen. In A Christmas Wedding (2000), the hero and heroine agree that her father is a sick man, and the hero adds: “And, as we would later find out to our dismay, dangerous too.” (ch. 19, p. 235) In a later book in the same series, September Song (2001), ch. 5 ends bluntly with: “The future would be a lot worse than I expected.” Oddly enough, in many cases the foreshadowing seems to overstate the result: what ultimately happens is less awful than we’ve been led to expect.

The “little did I know” trope isn’t confined to older works. Emily Devenport’s fascinating Medusa in the Graveyard (2019) seems to concentrate such hints in the midsection of the story: “That was about to change, but I didn’t know it” (ch. 14). “I didn’t know we were about to be confronted by . . .” (ch. 14). Or, deploying one of my favorite stock phrases: “Famous last words” (ch. 15).

As the examples indicate, this particular type of open foreshadowing by the narrator tends to occur especially in first-person narratives. It can also be used in the third person (“Little did she know…”), but in that case the quasi-presence of a narrator other than the main character becomes apparent—almost like “breaking the fourth wall.”

Similar Techniques

There are less obvious methods than “little did I know” to telegraph what’s coming up in a story, sharing some of the same weaknesses and strengths.

When the Fellowship of the Ring reaches Lothlorien, Frodo sees Aragorn lost in memory of meetings with Arwen there in days long past. He comes out of his reverie and, taking Frodo’s hand, “left the hill of Cerin Amroth and came there never again as living man.” (end of Book Two, ch. 6, p. 367) We wonder whether this third-person statement by the narrator means that Aragorn will die on the quest. But that doesn’t happen. (I think everyone is familiar with that spoiler.) Aragorn survives; but there’s no particular reason why he should come back to that particular spot (unless he and Arwen wanted to reminisce on their honeymoon), and it happens that he never does. When we reread the story, we may wonder why Tolkien makes such a point of telling us that Aragorn doesn’t come there again “as living man,” when nothing comes of it. (We’re not told that he visits as a ghost, either.)

We see a similar effect when an author doesn’t merely hint at, but shows us, the future: when a story starts at a later point and ‘doubles back’ to earlier events. This is a classic technique, as for example in The Aeneid; the fact that the story opens with Aeneas telling Dido about his escape from Troy means that we don’t have any suspense about whether he escapes when we later read those scenes. But sometimes the later-placed-earlier scene seems to be designed to set up our expectations, more or less explicitly.

First volume of Book of the Ancestor

For example, in Mark Lawrence’s Book of the Ancestor series, the very first book of the trilogy suggests that certain things are going to happen before the end. But (minor spoiler here) that scene, which is presented in several places during the story, is always incomplete and carefully limited; and when it finally occurs, the context makes it quite different from what we were led to expect. I found myself feeling that the author had sort of cheated – although that didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the story; it led me to wonder whether the foreshadowing scenes were really necessary at all.

In the limiting case, any first-person story gives us a pretty good idea that the narrator will survive at least to the end of the story, as noted in TV Tropes’ article on First-Person Perspective. Although it’s been known to happen that the hero dies at the end; the tale may conclude there, or may drop back to a third-party coda for the conclusion.

Similarly, the spoiler effect is already present in any classic tale where one already knows the conclusion—the Arthuriad, for example. Most ancient literature was written this way; Homer’s readers already knew that Troy lost the war. In such cases, our anticipation is not to learn the outcome of the story, but to find out how the author is going to get us there—as is also the case with many genre stories, such as romances and mysteries, and with historical fiction.

The Function of Foreshadowing

As noted above, foreshadowing of any type serves the purpose of shaping our expectations and building suspense. The mere glimpse attracts more attention than a complete revelation—a principle every fashion designer knows. The Wikipedia article also suggests that foreshadowing can make later events seem more plausible, since we’re already conditioned to expect them.

Plausibility can also be served by the lampshading function of a character’s anticipatory retrospective reflections. When Peters’ heroine in Summer of the Dragon comments on her own reaction—“ my compassion was stupid. I didn’t know how stupid until”—we are a little less inclined to excoriate the character for being an idiot, since the reflection makes clear that they now know they were an idiot.

So, if “little did I know” has legitimate functions, what’s the problem with it?

Looking Through a Character’s Eyes

Woman sits on wall looking out over a city

Viewpoint
(Image by Pexels from Pixabay)

There’s a strong trend these days toward choosing the viewpoint of a story to encourage the reader to identify as closely as possible with the main character(s). If a story isn’t told in first person, then one is advised to use “close” or “deep” third person, where the reader’s point of view is tightly limited to that of a particular character. There may be more than one viewpoint character, but while we’re in a given person’s head, we see only what they see, know only the things they know, experience their feelings as we face their challenges with them.

Presumably this is intended to make the reading experience more engaging and immersive. The frequent use today of present tense (“I open the door”) rather than the usual “narrative past” (“I opened the door”)—for example, in the Hunger Games trilogy—appears to be another means to the same end.

Now, I’m not slavishly devoted to the “close third” option. Plenty of the stories I read growing up were told in “omniscient” third person, where the author felt free to give the reader information the characters were not privy to. In the lost world-ship story Orphans of the Sky, for example, Heinlein fills us in on things that the characters, given the boundaries of their experience, cannot understand. Or consider Victor Hugo’s notorious disquisition on the Paris sewer system in Book the Second of Volume Five in Les Misérables. I’m comfortable with a more ‘distant’ viewpoint; I can read The Silmarillion as well as The Lord of the Rings.

The Downside of Knowing

Image by Helmut Strasil from Pixabay

But to my mind, the heavy-handed “little did I know” sort of foreshadowing does tend to pull one out of the story. We now know something the viewpoint character doesn’t; we are no longer sharing their feelings in the moment, but rather their retrospective evaluation based on later knowledge. We are not quite in the internal time of the story, but viewing it sub specie aeternitatis, from a point of view that is not time-bound. This distances us to some degree from the story.

The specific foreshadowing typical of these hints, as distinct from a general air of ominousness, builds dramatic tension; but it also reduces surprise. Of course, this kind of surprise is lost the second time you read any book. We already know what’s going to happen. Still, the building up of expectations proportionately reduces even the apparent freshness of the experience when the foreshadowed event finally takes place. We may find ourselves thinking more about the later events that are being implied than being “mindful” about the current action.

That diversion from the ‘narrative present’ may be particularly distracting when we don’t feel that the author makes good on the implied threat of the foreshadowing. If we’re told that something terrible is in the offing, and then it turns out not to be so bad after all, we may feel disappointed or cheated. Greeley’s stories are especially subject to this problem; on the second read-through, we may feel we’re being manipulated when the author earnestly warns us to expect something awful, but we know the outcome won’t live up to the warning. After a while, we may begin to take the author’s insinuations with a grain of salt, since we know their habit of overthreatening and not delivering.

The not-delivering can actually be a relief, rather than a letdown: ‘Whew, that wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.’ That reaction makes me ambivalent about the faux foreshadowing. The release of dramatic tension in a positive way may be as satisfying as the fulfillment in a negative way. Perhaps overthreatening actually is a useful device—particularly if we want the reader to be relieved rather than appalled.

My sense, in the end, is that “little did I know” is a technique to be used with care. Foreshadow away; but be sure of exactly what you’re trying to achieve and how the language used will accomplish it.

Books About Building

November 1, 2020 / Rick Ellrod / 6 Comments

Conflict and Challenge

The “conflict” we expect in a story can take many forms. External, internal; protagonists against themselves, against other people, against nature, against society. If you grew up on adventure stories, as I did, you may tend to focus on showy external struggles—wars and battles. (Explosions!!) Even more so if your formative reading included comic books: the first question for a new issue was always, who is Spider-Man fighting this month?—even if there might be more long-term interest in the issue’s developments regarding Spidey’s love life or character development.

But in some stories, or parts of stories, the focus is on building or making something, rather than fighting something. The underlying engine of such a story might better be called challenge than “conflict”—a struggle to achieve some definite end product, rather than to defeat an adversary. It’s a sort of engineering story, rather than a crisis—although there may be crises along the way.

Bob the Builder

Almost every possible kind of conflict can be found in Dennis Taylor’s “Bobiverse” science fiction novels: We are Legion (We are Bob), For We Are Many, All These Worlds (2016-2017). (Looking them up, I’m pleased to see a new sequel, Heaven’s River, is now out in audiobook form.) The series touches on a whole range of SF tropes, from first contact to space war to ecological catastrophe.

Bob Johansson, software magnate, dies in the 21^st century and wakes up a hundred years later as a sapient computer program, intended to be the guiding intelligence of an interstellar probe, like a computerized version of Jerome Corbell in Niven’s A World Out of Time. Once under way, however, Bob strikes out on his own, becoming involved with rival probes from another country, the evacuation of a failing Earth, and (eventually) honest-to-goodness aliens. His probe is equipped with 3-D printers and other gear that allows him to “clone” himself—build new ships run by copies of the Bob program. Each Bob instance takes a new name and, once running independently, develops a slightly different personality. Hence the book titles: we eventually have a whole armada of Bob spaceships, single-handedly—if that’s the right description—planting new human colonies and conducting interstellar wars.

But you don’t bootstrap your way into an armada overnight. A good bit of the story, especially in the early parts, requires Bob to balance multiple demands. How much of his productive capacity should be directed to manufacturing new Bobs, and how much to hunting down dangerous opponents? Or transporting human refugees to new worlds? To make matters more interesting, some of the Bobs specialize in research, coming up with new scientific discoveries that need to be engineered and adapted for others’ use—as time, transport, and communications permit.

Part of the fascination involves how Bob gradually builds up a sort of interstellar network of cooperating AI ships. (Of course they cooperate; they’re all Bob. Sort of.) How he does this, what difficulties and complications he runs into, is as intriguing as the more exotic or action-oriented sequences. It’s very cool to see one lone intelligent probe gradually develop into an entire star-spanning civilization.

Building Ships and Planets

F.M. Busby’s Rissa Kerguelen books (1976)—published in various combinations—are the saga of a young woman who starts out as an enslaved orphan under a vicious tyranny on Earth, and ends by bringing back a space fleet to overthrow the tyranny. She allies herself (both militarily and maritally) with the equally formidable Bran Tregare and the Hulzein family, who share that goal.

When I say “space fleet,” I’m not talking about thousands of massive ships. This is a bunch of modest-sized spacecraft manned by an assemblage of quirky, anarchic individuals—more like a Star Wars rebel fleet than an Honor Harrington space navy. Much of the middle section of the story is taken up with the long-term preparations needed for the eventual battles. Rissa and Tregare redesign and refit their stolen spaceships for combat; pull together the aforesaid individualists into a functional fighting group; and gradually, cautiously, get to know and love each other, after a battleground marriage for political purposes. That simultaneous slow build of machinery, financing, and relationships is as engrossing as Rissa’s initial escape from the “Total Welfare” system or the ultimate invasion of Earth. Even the engineering problems, solved in the context of these budding relationships, hold my interest throughout.

Or take Heinlein’s juvenile novel Farmer in the Sky (1950). Teenaged Bill Lermer emigrates with his family to Ganymede, which is being terraformed into a habitable site for Earthly settlers. The big moon is completely barren, devoid of life. The “terraforming” involves not just big technology, like the atmosphere plant and heat trap, but also the creation of soil suitable for farming, inch by inch. Rock has to be ground into soil, then seeded with Terrestrial microbes, earthworms, and the like, before the first crop can be planted. This process, which Bill sees at ground level—he’s a farmer-to-be, not a planner or engineer—is endlessly fascinating, though no doubt the details would differ if the book were written today, with seventy years’ more knowledge about the solar system. It left me with an abiding sense of how complex the web of geological and biological factors really is, underlying something so seemingly simple as dirt farming.

Building a Business

Not that you have to go to Ganymede to find a narrative about constructing something new. I recently mentioned R.F. Delderfield’s “Swann saga.” The hero (and the heroine) here are building up something apparently mundane: a trucking business, using the newfangled horseless carriages, to connect the railroad network to the small towns and hamlets of Victorian England. The characters tumble in and out of various conflicts, but the underlying thrust of the story is about the growth of a business. We see its material factors—vehicles, storehouses, roadways, Adam Swann’s unique organizational planning gizmo—but, more importantly, the varied people whose talents and peculiarities contribute to the success of the whole operation. Building a business enterprise can be as rewarding as building a spaceship—or a planet.

Occasionally this kind of constructive work also crops up in a modern corporate context. My catalogue of movie favorites contains only two stories I can think of that convey some of the excitement—the romance (in both senses of the word)—of big business. The Secret of My Success (1987), with Michael J. Fox and Helen Slater, is mostly a knockabout farce, but we do respond to the infectious enthusiasm of Fox’s character. What makes him more engaging than the other “suits” is that he’s excited about the idea of serving customers and making a productive business grow. Similarly, in Working Girl (1988), we’re mostly taken up in the plucky struggles of Melanie Griffith’s Tess McGill to break the glass ceiling of the secretarial pool; but we can also admire the artistry and accomplishment of the radio broadcasting merger deal she puts together.

Castaways and Escapes

Construction in the midst of a crisis can become an epic in itself. In Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer’s When Worlds Collide (1933), much of the story is taken up with the desperate challenges the protagonists must overcome as they race against time to build the spaceship that will enable them to escape Earth’s destruction. (Pay no attention to the 1951 movie version, which is a catastrophe in its own right.)

The oncoming disaster adds dramatic tension to an effort that would be heroic even if it were undertaken without that threat in view. We see the thousand dedicated people of Cole Hendron’s “cantonment” working on the massive project; striving to obtain the necessary resources as civilization begins to crumble around them; making the scientific breakthrough they need to control atomic energy for their engines; defending the ship against attacks by mobs reverted to barbarism; and rejoicing in immense relief when they find they can construct a second ship that will allow all of them, not just a fraction, to escape Earth’s doom. Even the momentary pauses to describe the design of the ship, or the careful preparations to take along the necessary plants, animals, and knowledge to recreate Earthly life on the new world, are engrossing in the context of the mighty achievement. In fact, after all this build-up, the actual brief space-flight is almost an anticlimax.

The whole subgenre of castaway or “desert island” stories almost automatically incorporates themes of making and building, often by ingenious improvisation. In an earlier post I mentioned Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island (1874), a childhood favorite of mine, and Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky (1955). Disney fans may recall the impressive treehouse of the Swiss Family Robinson movie (1960), faithfully re-created at Disney parks. In more modern renditions such as Eric Flint and Ryk Spoor’s Castaway Planet series, the main characters are similarly involved in carving out a place to live in an otherwise uninhabited locale.

Resources and Technology

The interest of stories like these is akin to the way we enjoy playing certain kinds of games, those with a “resource management” feature. I am, for example, perpetually fascinated with Sid Meier’s famous Civilization games. In managing a selected civilization throughout its history, we can get into wars with other “civs,” whether they are run by the computer or (in some versions) by another human player. But war is not essential to winning the game, as it is in chess. Exploration, the founding of new cities, and scientific development are vital, and offer other ways to win. While the danger of war with other cultures adds an important spice to the game, I find I’m more interested in discovering new places and developing a well-functioning culture.

Similar features can be found in other popular video games—Starcraft, Warcraft (but not World of Warcraft, which is a role-playing game), Settlers of Catan. Even the venerable Monopoly fits this description to some extent. To the extent to which these games are focused on winning, we do engage in a conflict; we seek a higher score than our competitors achieve. But sometimes it’s a relief to play a game that doesn’t directly involve fighting.

I mentioned scientific development in connection with Civilization. Researching how to make new sorts of units and improvements is crucial to that game. (By contrast, in Monopoly all we need to build houses and hotels is money, and monopolies.) Stories about building frequently involve playing out the consequences of a new technology, if only because new tech opens new opportunities and hence new fields for development.

Old-time space operas sometimes touched on this factor, but tended to short-cut the extensive work of implementing a new technology in favor of getting directly to the action. E.E. Smith’s Skylark Duquesne (1965), last of the Skylark tetralogy, alludes briefly in chapter 8 to the impact on Earthly industry of the fantastic scientific advances in the previous volumes. But those changes hardly have an impact on the story. We see a slightly more gradual and plausible development in a couple of books from Roger MacBride Allen, The Ring of Charon (1990) and The Shattered Sphere (1994), where a newly discovered artificial gravity technique gets put to use in progressively more advanced ways. Even the Delderfield Swann series mentioned above is based on the new opportunities created in the 19th Century by railroads and the internal-combustion engine.

Blessed are the Peaceful Makers

The peculiar enjoyment of stories about building comes, I think, partly from the sense we share with the characters of accomplishing something. The action of the story is constructive rather than destructive.

Granted, we’re perfectly willing to applaud destruction too, in a good cause. (Take that, Death Star!) And stories of violent conflict are perfectly suited to give us edge-of-the-seat thrills that are harder to come by in narratives of making. Still, we don’t always want an adrenaline rush all the time. It can be quietly satisfying when we don’t have to focus on winning a war, or on the danger of losing something dear to us and the desperation of defending it.

The satisfaction of successful making came up in a post last Christmas about the appeal of concreteness, whether in baking cookies or in building ships (as in the denouement of Pretty Woman). Both construction and destruction are sometimes necessary: “A time to build up, a time to break down.” But building responds to a different facet of our humanity than destroying. A good story may speak to one or the other, or to both.

Portraying the Transhuman Character

March 22, 2020 / Rick Ellrod / 7 Comments

More Than Human

Kevin Wade Johnson’s comments on my recent post about The Good Place raised a couple of issues worth a closer look. Here’s one:

Lots of science fiction, and some fantasy, deals with characters who are greater, or more intelligent, or more gifted in some way, than mere humans. But we the authors and readers are mere humans. How do we go about showing a character who’s supposed to be more sublime than we can imagine?

It’s one thing to have characters whose capabilities are beyond us. Superman can leap tall buildings with a single bound; I can’t. But I can easily comprehend Superman’s doing so. (I can even see it at the movies.) On the other hand, if a character is supposed to be so intelligent I can’t grasp their reasoning, or has types of knowledge that are beyond me, that’s harder to represent. I can simply say so: “Thorson had an intelligence far beyond that of ordinary men.” But how can I show it?

Long-Lived Experience

There are a number of ways this can come up. For example, if a character lived a very long time, would their accumulated experience allow for capabilities, or logical leaps in thinking, beyond what we can learn in our short lives?

I’m thinking of a Larry Niven story—I’m blanking on the name: maybe one of the “Gil the Arm” stories?—in which a character who appears to be a young woman turns out to be centuries old, and when she drops the deception, she moves with uncanny grace—she doesn’t bump into anything or trip over her own feet, because she’s had that long to train herself in how to move (without the limitations imposed by our bodies’ degeneration from aging).

Of course, a story about long-lived people doesn’t have to take long-lived learning into account. The depiction of the “Howard Families” in Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children and Time Enough for Love almost seem dedicated to the opposite proposition, that no matter how long we live, we’re basically the same kinds of personalities; we don’t learn much.

In a similar way, Tolkien’s immortal elves may seem ineffably glorious to us, but their behavior often seems all too human—especially if you read The Silmarillion, where elves make mistakes, engage in treachery, and allow overweening pride to dictate their actions in ways that may surprise those of us familiar only with LotR. On the other hand, the books and movies do succeed in convincing us that characters like Galadriel and Gandalf are of a stature that exceeds human possibility.

Logic and Language

There are other ways to have transhuman abilities. As Kevin observes, Niven’s “Protectors” fit the description. Niven imagines a further stage of human development—something that comes after childhood, adolescence, and adulthood—that we’ve never seen, because when our remote ancestors arrived on Earth from elsewhere, they lacked the plants hosting the symbiotic virus necessary for transition to that final stage. The “trans-adult” Protectors are stronger, faster, and more durable than ordinary humans. They also think faster. Thus Niven shows them as following out a chain of logic with blinding speed to its conclusion, allowing them to act long before regular humans could figure out what to do. Because this is a matter of speed, not incomprehensible thinking, Niven can depict a Protector as acting in ways that are faster than normal, but are explainable once we sit down and work out the reasoning.

A visual analogue is used in the 2009 and 2011 Sherlock Holmes films starring Robert Downey, Jr. Unlike most other treatments of the character, Guy Ritchie’s version supposes that Holmes’ incredible intelligence can be used not only for logical deduction, but to predict with lightning speed how a hand-to-hand combat may develop. Holmes thus becomes a ninja-like melee fighter, so effective as to confound all opponents. The movie shows us this by slowing down the process that to Holmes is instantaneous: we see a very short montage of positions and moves as they would occur, or could occur, before we see Holmes carry out the final “conclusion” of his martial reasoning. This allows us to appreciate what the quasi-superhuman character is doing and why, without actually having to execute the same process ourselves.

Preternatural intelligence may be more subtle in its effects. Such a person may, for example, be able to understand things fully from what, to us, would be mere hints and implications. So, for example, when Isaac Asimov introduces the members of the Second Foundation in his Foundation series, he tells us that their tremendous psychological training allows them to talk among themselves in a manner so concise and compressed that entire paragraphs require only a few words.

Speech as known to us was unnecessary. A fragment of a sentence amounted almost to long-winded redundancy. A gesture, a grunt, the curve of a facial line—even a significantly timed pause yielded informational juice. (Second Foundation, end of chapter 1, “First Interlude,” p. 16)

Breaking the fourth wall, Asimov warns us that his account is “about as far as I can go in explaining color to a blind man—with myself as blind as the audience.” (same page) He then adroitly avoids showing us any of the actual conversation; instead, he says he’s “freely translating” it into our ordinary language. This move illustrates one of the classic ways of presenting the incomprehensible in a story: point out its incomprehensibility and “translate” into something we can understand. (Note that this is much more easily done in writing than in a visual medium such as TV or the movies.)

A similar technique is used by Poul Anderson in his 1953 novel Brain Wave, which starts with the interesting premise that in certain regions of space, neurons function faster than in others. When Earth’s natural rotation around the center of the galaxy brings it into a “faster” area, the brains of every creature with a central nervous system speed up, and human beings (as well as other animals) all become proportionately smarter. Anderson notes that the speech of the transformed humans would be incomprehensible to us and, like Asimov, “translates” it for our convenience. When a couple of the characters, in a newly invented faster-than-light spaceship, accidentally cross the border back into the “slow zone,” they are unable to understand the controls they themselves designed until the ship’s travel brings them out and lets their intelligence return to its new normal. (Anderson’s concept may have been the inspiration for the “Zones of Thought” universe later developed in several fascinating stories by Vernor Vinge.)

Showing and Telling

We can glean some general principles from these examples. If the extraordinary acts don’t actually have to be shown in the medium I’m using, I can simply point to them and tell the reader they’re there. In a written story, I can say my main character is a world-class violinist without having to demonstrate that level of ability myself. (Although if I have some experience in that particular art, I’ll be able to provide some realistic details, to help make my claim sound plausible.) But if the supernormal achievement is something that can be shown in our chosen medium, we have to be able to demonstrate it: a movie about the great violinist will have to exhibit some pretty masterful violin-playing, or those in the audience who know something about the art will laugh themselves silly.

We should note that there are good and bad ways of telling the audience about a character’s superiority. In the unforgettable short story “Flowers for Algernon,” which consists entirely of diary entries by Charlie Gordon, the main character, the text vividly shows us the effects of an intelligence-raising treatment on a man of initially lower-than-normal intelligence. The entries improve so radically in writing competence and understanding that when Charlie describes how his brainpower is beginning to exceed that of ordinary humans, we believe him, because we’re already riding on the curve of rising ability up to our own level that is apparent in the text—a true tour de force of writing. On the other hand, in the drastically worse movie version, Charly (1968), the screenwriters are reduced to having Charly stand in front of an audience of experts and scornfully dismiss the greatest intellectual achievements from human history—a weak and ineffective technique at best for conveying superiority.

Summary

This quick review of the problem turns up several methods for handling supernormal abilities in a story.

If the superior ability is intelligible to us ordinary people in the audience—maybe it’s just doing normal things faster—we can have the wiser or super-enabled person explain it to someone less wise: our last post’s Ignorant Interlocutor.
If the advantage is mainly a matter of speed, we can slow it down to a speed at which regular people can follow the action.
If we can get away without actually showing the ability in question, we may be able to point toward it, or “translate” it into something we can understand, and convincingly tell the audience about it—if we can achieve the necessary suspension of disbelief.
If a character is supposed to be, let us say, preternaturally wise, and there’s simply no way to avoid showing that in the dialogue, the best we can do is to evoke the best we can do—have the character be as wise as possible—and imply ‘like this, only more so.’ This method—like “projecting” a line or a curve—is the method of “supereminence,” which is sometimes employed in theological talk about things that are inherently beyond our full understanding.

Kicking around this question makes us aware that portraying the more-than-human character is only a special case of a more general problem. When our stories try to incorporate anything that’s indescribable, incomprehensible, how do we handle that? Our F&SF stories frequently want to reach out beyond the boundaries of human experience, yet in a tale written for ordinary humans. We’ll talk about the more general question next time.

Changing the Past – Or Avenging It

September 22, 2019 / Rick Ellrod / 7 Comments

Introduction

I set out to do an analytical essay on Three Theories of Time Travel—until I realized that Larry Niven’s astute and entertaining brief article “The Theory and Practice of Time Travel” (1971) had already covered those theories pretty well. (You can find that article in Niven’s All the Myriad Ways, and a couple other locations.) So I decided instead to comment on how they’re used in Avengers: Endgame, which seems to invoke at least two and possibly three different theories.

Maybe I’d have been better off sticking with the original plan; this post has turned out to be considerably longer than I’d planned.

Endgame came out on April 26, 2019, and was released on disc August 13, so it’s still new enough at this writing that I should issue a

I’m not going to address the mechanics of how one might travel into the past—whether via Tipler machines, or wormholes, or simply thinking oneself into the past à la Jack Finney. (Endgame manages it via what the movies refer to as the “Quantum Realm,” which is completely incoherent in one way but rather fascinating in another—a side issue I won’t go into here.) I’m interested in what happens if you let causality turn back on itself. I can think of three main ways of handling the question of changing the past. Each has its pros and cons, from a storytelling point of view.

“Make It Didn’t Happen”

First, let’s suppose we can change the past (and, by extension, the present and future). The idea arises because we often wish we could go back and undo something—either our own actions, or the broader course of history. Niven observes, “When a child prays, ‘Please, God, make it didn’t happen,’ he is inventing time travel in its essence.” He goes on to note, “The prime purpose of time travel is to change the past; and the prime danger is that the Traveler might change the past.” These twin aspects of the idea generate plot tensions and conflicts immediately, on both a personal and a historical scale, so it’s not surprising they’re so popular.

The most familiar example, of course, is Back to the Future (1985-1990). In the three movies, Zemeckis played several variations on the idea of making history come out differently. The cultural reference is so well-known that Marvel was able to riff off it for a comic moment in Endgame. Scott Lang, the young and relatively naïve Ant-Man, says they’ll be okay if they obey the ‘rules of time travel’ (at about 0:35). Tony Stark, the all-round genius of the Marvel movies, derides Scott for having gotten his “rules” from BTTF, and proceeds to shoot the notion down as hopelessly unscientific.

And Tony’s right, in the sense that building a theory of time travel purely on the assumptions made in fictional stories is silly. We don’t know what would happen if it were possible to change the past; we haven’t done it. That would make time travel really dangerous if it could be attempted in real life. On the other hand, that same lack of knowledge leaves a wide field open for the fiction writer. We can make whatever assumptions we like, as long as they’re consistent. We can imagine that you can only go back in time a certain distance, at a certain geographical location, as in Julian May’s Saga of Pliocene Exile (1981-84). We can imagine that the transition requires vast energies, as in Arthur C. Clarke’s story “Technical Error” (1950). Or we can invoke the imaginary “Pym particles” of Ant-Man lore and time-travel at will.

This first theory of time travel generates the paradoxes we know and love. We have the “grandfather paradox,” in which an effect removes its own cause. (I go back in time and kill my grandfather.) We have what Wikipedia calls the “ontological paradox,” in which an effect becomes its own cause. (I go back but my grandfather fails to show up, so I marry my grandmother instead and name my son after my dad…) I talked about these a bit in a 2016 post on the TV series Timeless.

One thing that’s not always obvious is that the idea of changing the past requires a second time dimension. There’s the familiar one that’s typically represented by a “timeline,” a one-dimensional line ordering events from past to future. But if someone changes the past, then the old line has to be replaced by a new one: imagine a second timeline lying next to the first. Every time a change is made, another timeline gets added. The set of lines forms a plane, extending through a second dimension, in which each new timeline happens after (in some Pickwickian sense) the last. Otherwise, it wouldn’t make any sense to say that we’d changed history. Marty can’t rejoice in having “fixed” his family unless the new timeline succeeds the first, just as events along the timeline succeed each other. Hence, a second time dimension, to accommodate the sequence of timelines. (This may, or may not, be related to what TV Tropes calls “San Dimas Time,” a reference from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989).

As a narrative device, the chance to change the past creates suspense. But it only works if you don’t look too closely. The author has to stage-manage things carefully so that changes of all sorts don’t start happening in all directions, and this means that time travel must be rare. If we imagine a period of hundreds or thousands of years, during which people invent time machines every so often and start changing the past, it would become impossible to make sense of what was happening. Different changes, each with their rippling “butterfly effects,” would take place, one after another—or even at the same, er, time. (I tried playing around with that idea in an as-yet-unpublished story called Getting to Gettysburg.) So I’m skeptical about stories based on letting time travel become routine, as in “Time Patrol” scenarios or Asimov’s The End of Eternity.

Avengers Disassemble

Does Endgame, after all Tony’s disclaimers, involve changing the past? Maybe not; but it’s hard to see how the story can avoid it.

The screenwriters chose to set themselves an interesting dilemma that makes the simple time-travel solution (go back and kill Thanos) unusable. When the time-travel possibility arises, five years have passed since the Snap, in which Thanos killed off half the people in the universe. Life has gone on. Tony and Pepper, for example, have an adorable little girl. But eliminating the Snap would also eliminate Tony’s little daughter Morgan, along with everything else that’s happened since. That’s unacceptable (at least to Tony). So the Avengers are not trying to avert the Snap; instead, they want to bring back, in the present time, all those who disintegrated.

The reason they have to go into the past is to retrieve the six Infinity Stones, which Thanos destroyed after the Snap. The Avengers will need to use the Stones for a Snap of their own to bring back all the people Thanos destroyed. But in order to avoid changing the past, they will have to put the Stones back in their earlier times after they’ve been used. This is a clever idea, but it’s going to be really tricky to execute in practice, as we’ll discuss below.

It’s Already Happened

Meanwhile, the business of a second time dimension may make us start to wonder about the whole idea of changing the past. Maybe we’ve forgotten to take into account the integrity of the original time dimension. After all, if something happened in the past, it has already happened. The effects of past events should be baked into the present that follows from them. If I go back to 1800 and leave a hidden time capsule, let’s say, I should be able to dig it up in 2019. You might say that the change I wish to make has already taken place.

But it follows that if I can find the evidence in the present, then I know the event occurred in the past. (That’s what “evidence” means.) If I find the time capsule, I know that it was buried. This may allow me to predict or “retrodict” my future changes to the past on the basis of what’s known now. If I find the time capsule, I know I’m going to bury it—or someone else will. A key scene in Kate and Leopold (2001) relies on just such a discovery about a future event that changes the past. (Have we mixed up the tenses enough yet?) Bill and Ted makes even more comically inventive use of this aspect.

But on this theory, the event in the past isn’t really a change. It was always that way. The time capsule persisted through all the intervening time. You can’t change the past, because your change is already included in the past we know and thus embedded in the present. As Niven puts it, “any attempt on the part of a time traveler to change the past has already been made, and is a part of the past.”

This approach deprives us of the fun of changing history, but I rather like it. It ensures the timeline remains consistent with itself. In fact, one version of this postulate is referred to as the “Novikov self-consistency principle,” named for Russian physicist Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov. We avoid grandfather paradoxes: we already know I didn’t succeed in traveling into the past and killing my grandfather, because here I am. If I try, something will go wrong. On the other hand, ontological paradoxes are still allowed, as in Heinlein’s classic novella By His Bootstraps (1941). In fact, I tend to think of this as ‘Heinlein’s theory of time travel,’ because he used it extensively—not only in Bootstraps and the even more baffling “—All You Zombies—” (1959), but also in the delightful The Door Into Summer (1957). Of course, Heinlein’s by no means the only writer using a Novikov-type theory.

One reason I like this type of time travel story is that everything fits neatly together, like a puzzle. The fun of the story is in seeing how they’ll fit. In that sense, the enjoyment of you-already-changed-the-past stories resembles that of the Greek tragedies, in which an oracular pronouncement tells what’s going to happen, and the story shows how it happens. No matter how Oedipus tries to avoid the awful future foretold, he can’t. The efforts to avoid the predicted outcome may themselves produce it.

In such a tragedy, where time travel isn’t involved (except to the extent the oracle itself is future information acting on the past), the Greek tragedy tends to suggest that the outcome is determined by some kind of Fate, whether we like it or not. (Niven puts this view under the heading of “determinism.”) But the Novikov-type theory can also be seen as compatible with free will. Even actions freely taken, once they are complete, become part of the fabric of history, not subject to further change afterwards—except to the extent that backward causation via time travel is possible, which alters the whole meaning of “afterwards.”

A subclass of these stories assumes that the time continuum somehow defends itself against change. It may automatically “self-heal” to swallow up minor changes, or all changes: Edison doesn’t invent the light bulb, but someone else does. Or the time stream may simply be designed so that with “fail-safes” that prevent catastrophic causality failures. At the end of The Door Into Summer, the engineer hero seems to be speculating in this direction: if time travel could be used commercially, he thinks,

it will be because the Builder designed the universe that way. He gave us eyes, two hands, a brain; anything we do with them can’t be a paradox. He doesn’t need busybodies to “enforce” His laws; they enforce themselves. (p. 158)

In a modern context, God seems to take over the role of Fate—not by predetermining everything, but by designing the system (i.e., the universe) so nothing can go fatally wrong with causality. Something similar, I think, lies behind the way the time travel “net” portal functions in Connie Willis’s time travel stories. If allowing something through the net would create a paradox, the net simply won’t open—which leads to some tortuous reasoning by the characters as to what is keeping the net from openingaat a particular moment. Something like Providence seems to be at work. The only causal loops allowed are what we might call ‘virtuous loops’—those that work out right.

What makes this confusing is that we’re used to analyzing causality by looking at the conditions preceding the effect. Here, we don’t see the ‘virtuous loop’ conditions being set at any particular point in time. The conditions have to apply to the continuum as a whole—from outside it, in effect.

You Can’t Avenge the Future

When Tony initially declares Scott’s proposed “time heist” impossible, the remaining Avengers bring in Bruce Banner as a substitute scientific resource. Banner (who now combines his own brain with the Hulk’s body) does make a nod to the fact that his scientific expertise is primarily in biology, not physics, but the story remains basically true to the comic-book idea that a scientific genius is a genius in every science. At about 0:59, Banner says something that sounds rather like the Novikov principle we’ve been discussing: if you kill someone in the past, that doesn’t erase their later selves. Apparently causality doesn’t propagate down the world lines of already-existing characters to wipe them out when their original causes go away. On this theory, Marty wouldn’t have had to worry about disappearing even if he couldn’t get his parents back together.

On the other hand, Bruce doesn’t seem to be saying you can’t kill the person in the past; he seems to be saying that if you did kill them, it wouldn’t make any difference. This may have more to do with what TV Tropes calls “ontological inertia” (see here, but also here). Bruce’s approach seems to allow for wild inconsistency in the timeline, because I can be alive in 2019 even after being killed in 1971.

The simplest answer may be to conclude that Bruce wasn’t a very good physicist; maybe Tony silently corrected Bruce’s theory when Tony finally did agree to join the party.

Branching Timelines

At some point in SF history, people realized that the whole paradox thing could be avoided by introducing a third theory, the notion of multiple branching timelines. Niven’s phrase is “multiple time tracks.” If you change the past, the original future going forward from that point remains unchanged, but a new future comes into existence, branching off to take into account the change. (The character making the change always seem to end up in the new branch, not the old.) We can have our cake and eat it too: one version of me devours the cake, but another, equally real, version of me prudently saves the cake for later.

The multiple-timeline approach gains some headway from the general popularity of alternate-history stories, and some plausibility from the fact that physicists take seriously the suggested “many-worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics. It appears to solve the problem of time paradoxes. However, it runs very close to an assumption that would make it impossible to tell a good story at all.

Stories are about action and choice. A mere recounting of a series of experiences that happen to someone wouldn’t be much of a story (which is one reason the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey is so weak). James Michener’s introduction to the novel Hawaii (1959), which describes the geological formation of the islands, is only part of a story because it lays the groundwork for what the characters later say and do.

If every possible alternative branched off a new timeline whenever there were options, there would be no point in making a choice, because whichever choice I made, another version of me would make the opposite choice. Niven captures the problem exactly:

. . . did you ever sweat over a decision? Think about one that really gave you trouble, because you knew that what you did would affect you for the rest of your life. Now imagine that for every way you could have jumped, one of you in one universe did jump that way.

Now don’t you feel silly? Sweating over something so trivial, when you were going to take all the choices anyway. And if you think that’s silly, consider that one of you still can’t decide . . . (p. 117)

The title story in All the Myriad Ways explores exactly that issue—what would happen if people really started to believe that all alternatives were equally real.

But suppose we assume that every choice doesn’t spawn alternate universes—just the changes caused by time travel, by backward causality. That doesn’t destroy all narrative in the way just described. It just ruins the story you’re trying to tell. The main characters move heaven and earth to get into the past and make the necessary change. They succeed! Whew. Victory. —Except that in another universe, the original one, they didn’t succeed. Somewhere, the sad failures who are Marty McFly’s parents still languish by the TV. That’s not a really satisfying conclusion.

Alternating Avengers

The multiple-timeline approach certainly comes up in Endgame. What I can’t make out is whether it prevails in the end, or is averted.

At about 1:24 in the movie, Bruce Banner is having a tense conversation with the Ancient One (Dr. Strange’s mentor) about the plan to return the stones to their original places in time. The idea is that if he takes the Time Stone from the Ancient One at (let’s say) 1:03:12 p.m. on January 31, 2010, and eventually Steve Rogers returns it to her at 1:03:13 p.m. on January 31, 2010, there won’t be a need for a branch to form. History continues on as it had always been. (Steve describes his mission concisely at 2:43 in the movie: “I know. Clip all the branches.”) Thus, the timeline of the movie, in which Thanos Snapped half the universe away, and five years later the assembled Avengers brought them back and did away with Thanos, remains the one-and-only timeline. There’s a helpful description of this procedure in an article from July 2019 (which is also full of spoilers, by the way).

If we leave aside how hard it would have been to put things back exactly as they were, given the butterfly effect—not all the Stone retrievals were as simple as Bruce’s—does this work? Did the screenwriters (Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely) come up with a way to manage the dizzying time loops and still save the story?

I’m still not quite sure. One glaring plot hole, as various people have pointed out, is that we have to account for Thanos himself. In order to give us a great battle at the end (and what a battle it is!), the movie has Thanos in pre-Snap 2014 discover what’s going to happen and time-travel forward to 2019, where he’s ultimately disintegrated by the Avengers. He never returns to 2014. That seems to mean that the disappearance of Thanos did create a branch, since if he vanished from 2014 and never came back, the Snap would never have occurred.

At least that reduces us to two timelines, the one we see in the movie and another where Thanos does not continue to exist after 2014. And, interestingly enough, the Avengers’ actions saved both of those timelines from the Snap. The people who lived through the movie timeline experienced the Snap, but the lost people were eventually returned. Meanwhile, in the new alternate timeline, Thanos never came back, he never got the Infinity Stones, and the Snap never occurred. That’s not such a bad (dual) ending.

I don’t know. All these causal loops produce a kind of shell game in which I’m not quite sure how things came out. Nonetheless, it’s a great movie, if you like the Marvel characters at all. If you haven’t seen it, you shouldn’t have been reading this (but maybe the circuitous account above will be helpful). If you have—see it again! Just don’t try to go back to April to catch the premiere a second time; who knows what that would do to the space-time continuum.

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