Asimov’s The End of Eternity Headed to Big Screen

Variety has news that Isaac Asimov’s 1955 novel “The End of Eternity” is headed for the big screen courtesy of director Kevin Macdonald, who last directed the political thriller “State of Play” and before that, the award-winning “The Last King of Scotland”. Macdonald will adapt and direct the novel for New Regency, but not before he finishes up his Roman drama “Eagle of the Ninth”.

So what’s “The End of Eternity” about? Wiki to the rescue:

The Eternity of the title is an organization and a place which exists outside time. It is staffed by humans (usually male) called Eternals who are recruited from different eras of human history commencing with the twenty-seventh century. The Eternals are capable of traveling “upwhen” and “downwhen” within Eternity and entering the conventional temporal world at almost any point of their choice, apart from a section of the far future which they cannot enter. Collectively they form a corps of Platonic guardians who carry out carefully calculated and planned strategic minimum actions, called Reality Changes, within the temporal world in order to minimise human suffering as integrated over the whole of (future) human history.

A key plot element that emerges quickly as the story unfolds is the relatively static nature of the human societies in the various future centuries, and the repeated failure of space travel in all accessible centuries. We later learn that Twissell (Harlan’s superior) is from “a Century in the 30,000’s,” yet nothing much is different in that time.

The pivotal moment of the story arrives when the protagonist, Andrew Harlan, an expert in executing Reality Changes, realizes that he is part of a paradoxical scheme to secure the creation of Eternity by sending a young Eternal back in time with the mathematical knowledge to make it possible. Harlan himself is in trouble with the leaders of Eternity. He has been entrapped by one of them into entering into a relationship with a non-Eternal woman, Noÿs Lambent. This was intended merely to prove a point about the effect of Eternity on the individuals from real time who learn of it, but it has the unintended consequence of making Harlan besotted with the woman, so much so that he smuggles her into Eternity, since he has discovered that she will cease to exist in real time when the Eternals make their next Reality Change. Harlan’s whole scheme comes apart when it is revealed the leaders are fully aware of his activities.

Basically, real heady sci-fi stuff.