Just another one in the U.S. who finished reading LIAGB today. Frankly, I was very impressed with our author's ability to have worked out many of the questionable nuances of time travel and changing the past. It sparked some thought on my part - mainly about Colonel Next's pink slime ordeal and how time was, in a sense, recycling. I was wondering about anyone else's ideas on this topic?

As another U.S. reader who has just recently made the acquaintance of Fforde's series, I have the opposite impression of his use of time travel. His treatment is not profoundly serious or logical, it is satirical -- as it is on every other topic he touches.

If an author is trying to construct an imaginary universe with its own internal laws, then those laws have to be followed consistently. You can write about time travel that changes the past, or about time travel that causes the past to be what it was in an endless causal loop, but not both in the same story (or series) except on pain of illogic. You can write about time travel in which a backwards traveler meets her own former self (as when Thursday's car pops into her hospital room), or time travel in which she replaces her own former self (as when she rides the Skytrain), but if you try to do both at once you get a universe with no really thought-through concept of time travel at all. Fforde's Nextian Universe contains all these elements jumbled together, and he gets away with it because the unifying feature of his universe is satire, not a consistent set of internal laws.

The incident of the disastrous pink goo, which is stretched out through Lost in a Good Book, is an example of this mixture. The bag of pink goo comes from a future which the characters have to abolish; abolishing it creates a very long causal loop into the distant past; yet without that loop, which abolishes the disastrous future, the abolished future could never occur in the first place (there would be no life on earth). This is illogical, but the story is told in a way that distracts attention from its illogic. A further inconsistency is that, until we learn what the pink goo is, we see it being handled in ways that will turn out to be impossible (for instance, it can safely be tasted), but as soon as we know what it is, this stops. This works because satire does not demand a consistent universe; the story's internal unity consists of being consistently satirical.

A person who reads a satire without previous experience of the thing being satirized may possibly glimpse, despite the satire, some of the qualities of the original, and the original may be what the particular reader really wants. C.S. Lewis somewhere reports that this was his boyhood experience with Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee parody on Arthurian legend. But that means reading a book in a style quite contrary to its intent.

Time travel with causal loops has been around since (at least) Robert Heinlein's stories of (I think) the 1950s, "By his Bootstraps" and "All You Zombies." A recent and very carefully elaborated story of this type is Audrey Niffenegger's long novel The Time Traveler's Wife, in which the causal loops are always rigorously consistent and never change the past, even when the characters are trying very hard to change it. But although it contains humorous incidents along with its poignant ones, it is not a satire.

Hi LarryK and Ambiguity...welcome

Well, when it comes to the time travel issue and Jasper, it's best if one just suspend belief (or is that disbelief) and just roll with it. LOL

I think Jasper's version of time travel is somewhere in between what you're both saying and LarryK brings up a good point about reading a satire without knowing what it's satirizing. What I mean, is that if you read a lot of books about time travel, you may already have a preconceived notion on how it *must* work, but if you've never really read much, you don't have any idea and Jasper's version seems fun and quite plausible. I think it's just sorta somewhere in the middle. Yes, there are inconsistencies, but really, isn't that sorta what makes Jasper's writing fun?

Welcome, both of you.

I don't agree, Larry K. Mr Ff's stories aren't based on logic, so why should the internal rules of his world be? They are satirical works, but even if they weren't it wouldn't make their content invalid. There's no reason why one set of circumstances shouldn't trip one set of causal rules and another a different set... it is a very flexible world. Impossible things happen even in this world (or they seem so to us because we haven't yet grasped all the rules).

I think you may be limiting yourself in trying to impose your understanding of others' precedents on someone else's universe. Just a thought...



Post Edited (06-20-04 23:48)

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