This book was about a man (Billy Pilgrim) who was abducted by tralfamadorians, an alien species that can see in four dimensions. Billy is stuck traveling through all the stages of his life, over and over again. He already knows what happens, and can do nothing about it, because it has already happened. It follows a type of "self consistency" principle, so the result is the same in the past, because he was destined to go back in time the whole time. Therefore, he can not change the past, because it has already happened.
This book was amusing to read because of the constant subtle humor throughout the book. I kept a list of pages that made me chuckle while reading through the book, and it got quite long. Almost ten entries in total, of small notes to look back at, and chuckle to myself again.
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A business is being run where it takes you on a “safari” trip of any time in history you want. They also guide you to a specific animal to kill. However this story uses the chaos theory to explain time travel, where the smallest change you do in that past affects the future in massive ways. The business marks an animal that would have died in a few minutes anyways for the buying to hunt. They also have a floating platform you must stay on as not to interact with the environment as much as possible. The customer signs up for a T-rex, and when he sees it panics tremendously. He did not expect it to be as large, and proclaims that it is unkillable. In his panic, he leaves the platform and steps on the dirt. After they return to present time, they notice he had stepped on a butterfly. They also notice the election had a different outcome, and possibly more un-noticed effects. Only fitting to step on a butterfly, and return to see the butterfly effect.
My first time reading this was not this year, and I didn't notice that I had previously read it until I had already begun. It is a very memorable story, and is a very good example of the butterfly effect. Not only is the type of time travel fit the chaos theory (the effect is called the butterfly effect), but in the story the event that triggers the change is him stepping on a butterfly. An apparent super genius comes home one day to see his wife in the arms of another man. The author describes him as easily able to split the two apart considering his stature. Hassel (the main character) being the super genius he is would not be content with even going as far as to kill his wife, instead, he angrily makes a time machine around himself, and travels back in time to meet his wife's father. After he murders him, he returns and sees the same wife still embraced by the man. He is baffled. He goes back and kills her grandmother just to make sure he wasn't mistaken on their relation. He returns, and they are still there. He thinks maybe that the killings were too small of events to have changed history, and goes on a rampage killing people of greater and greater influence in history. George Washington, Christopher Columbus, and eventually even Mohammed. He learns that time doesn't work the way he thought. He meets a man who has gone missing many years ago, who claims he created a time machine too. He explains that time is very personal, and is only changed relative to yourself. "Time is entirely subjective. It is a private matter - a personal experience." "There is no universal continuum... there are only billions of individuals each with his own continuum." He goes on to explain that since he only changed his own past, the individual worlds of others go on, but his has ceased to exist. This has been my favorite story to read so far. It had many witty lines/conversations, and interesting ways of ignoring unnecessary details. For example, Hassel went to "unknown university", and unknown university is brought up many times throughout the story, and used as a metaphor of sorts. The main character is such a humorous character. His demeanor throughout the entire story is very aggravated, and I just imagine him stomping around annoyed throughout the entire book. His decisions and reactions are all very over the top or even comically exaggerated. Just killing his wife wouldn't have been enough. Instead, he has to build a time machine just to kill her parents so she could never be born. In all conversation, he seems very annoyed with how things turned out. "What do you mean ___!" He often exclaims. “Mohammed didn’t change things much—I expected more from him.” “I know. I got him too.” “What do you mean, you got him too?” Hassel demanded. "In exactly seven and one half minutes (such was his rage), he put together a time machine (such was his genius)" Alfred Bester, the author
This story was so compact. It was so short, and still told a complex story. It starts off normal enough; a man in a bar talking about his childhood. He was born a girl in and sent to an orphanage. 18 years later she is seduced an impregnated by a man who abandons her directly afterwards. She gives birth by Caesarean section, and the doctors notice that she is intersex, meaning she has both male and female organs. The caesarean section forced the doctors to also change her sex to male, due to complications with having both parts. At least she has the baby, she thinks, proud of at least something. Nope. That was stolen by some guy who came in directly after birth. She is telling this to the bartender, and the bartender offers revenge on the man who seduced and abandoned her. The bartender takes him to a time machine in the back room, and goes back to the hospital and steals the baby, gives it to an orphanage, and then returns to the bar, takes the man back to the time he was seduced. However, he is distracted by a girl and is instinctively attracted to her. He seduces and impregnates her, however the girl was also his past self before the sex change. He connects the dots and realizes that he was all of them at once.
This story was interesting in how little details the author adds to the events. It was such a strange order of events, that I think the length of the story adds to the ridiculousness. Nothing is described very well, and everything happens so quickly that it feels absolutely chaotic. There were also a lot of poorly explained reasons for action. For example I'm not really sure why the man went back and was attracted to his past self, then decided to impregnate her. |
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