The Time Travel Book That Made Me Finally Read Asimov

this was my first Asimov, i know, i know, i’m decades late to the party, but i kept putting him off because i figured Foundation would be a whole commitment and i wanted something smaller to test the waters first. The End of Eternity turned out to be exactly the right entry point. Andrew Harlan is a Technician for an organization called Eternity that reaches into different centuries and nudges events, tiny changes, all supposedly for the greater good of humanity, and then of course he falls for a woman who isn’t supposed to exist in the timeline anymore and everything unravels from there.

the world building has this made up vocabulary, upwhen and downwhen instead of just future and past, which felt clunky for about two chapters and then just clicked and started feeling natural, which is a neat trick honestly.

the romance plot is where i had the most trouble though, and i wasn’t the only one, a few reviewers flagged Noys as basically a plot device wearing a person’s clothes rather than an actual character, and once that got named i couldn’t unsee it, her whole arc exists to justify what Harlan does rather than the other way around. i also read that the Eternals get name checked later on in Foundation’s Edge, which sent me down a whole rabbit hole trying to figure out how connected Asimov actually meant these universes to be.

the twist ending though, genuinely got me, i did not see it coming and i’m a little annoyed at myself for not seeing it coming, because the clues are all there once you look back.

four stars. slow start, clunky romance, an ending that earns it.