Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

This is our discussion of the Classic SF/fantasy novel....


The Timegod by L.E. Modesitt Jr.

This was the first book by Modesitt I read back in the late 70s. It was published as "The Fires of Paratime" by TimeScape. On the SF Round Table on GEnie, we were told it would be republished under the current title with changes, but there aren't many, if any. The addition of a prequel makes it even better, though. I really like the way Modesitt plays with history & historical stories. There are always kernels of truth, but it's never completely accurate.

I'm at chapter 14 and I'm finding it hard to stay interested. The world and characters seem sketchy, like a superficial glance. Does this happen to anybody else?

I like the (not so covert) state dictatorship "for your own good", that's very current.

I'm running a bit behind and only just getting started. I don't think I've read any Modesitt before, so something new...

When you do read, let me know if you share my impression of there being hardly any thread between chapters. It feels as if each were part of an independently published piece.

I've read a fair amount of Modesitt, but this one is new to me. (I've read big chunks of the Recluse saga, and a few other things, but I haven't read much of his work published post-2000.)

I'm only a few chapters in so far. (Loki has accompanied Baldur to acquire a fusion generator on Sinopol.) I'm still pretty entertained -- but, Nadia, I did have some of that sense of events happening as independent episodes. I wondered whether it had been written with serialization in mind.

I seem to recall a lot of Modesitt's work having a big training component (this is true of The Magic of Recluse, for instance). He also pays a lot of attention to technology and infrastructure (hence Baldur's lecture on understanding tech) -- so I'm hoping he'll be playing with those concepts in interesting ways across changing timelines as the story builds.

Unlike many contemporary series that take place almost entirely in a school setting, the Guard training section hasn't really developed the political or personal rivalries that I assume are going to emerge later on. We get some heavy foreshadowing that things are not as hunky-dory as they might seem (Freyda's suspicious! there's a rabble-rouser who doesn't like Guards! the protagonists' name is Loki!) so I assume Loki is heading for a major break with the establishment (and at least one visit to Hell) but so far I'm mostly in the dark as to what's going to motivate the antagonists.

Nadia wrote: "When you do read, let me know if you share my impression of there being hardly any thread between chapters. It feels as if each were part of an independently published piece."

Interesting. I just finished a book that I felt the same about - too much going on, not connected well enough. I don't recall that about this book, but it's been a long time since I first read it. I'll try to keep this in mind when I reread it soon. Modesitt doesn't spell everything out. The reader generally has to think about the story in order to get it. He's not as terse as Zelazny could be, though.

There are some rivalries later on (I'm at chapter 17 now), but I don't see a clear motivation. Maybe it will be explained later on? I am liking the setting more and more. Didn't the last test feel a bit like the hunger games?

I adore Zelazny's Amber chronicles.

Thinking of The warriors apprentice, Bujold doesn't expand the school/training setting, but the first chapter is enough to get a firm grasp of the character's complexities. Who is Loki? Why does he want what he wants?

The training period & that last test are also cuing the reader into the mechanics of time-diving so we have a better sense of the stakes going forward. The mix of myth & sci-fi definitely had me thinking of Zelazny.

Do you think they influenced each other? I didn't check which book came out first, but now that you mention it, it does resemble how they move through shadow. But with seemingly nicer family politics, less noir and a full society, even if it is also an aristocracy.

Nadia wrote: "Do you think they influenced each other?..."

Nine Princes in Amber came out in 1970, while this book was first published 12 years later, so I'd say any influence was Zelazny to Modesitt. Delany had also published The Einstein Intersection back in the mid 60s, while Zelazny published This Immortal about the same time & both similar mixes of SF & fantasy. Better books IMO, although I really like this one.

I think vagueness about Loki that is done on purpose - to point out just how freaking clueless he is. That's always been my one complaint about this - he's a little too clueless - but there are plenty of hints as to what is really going on which are more easily picked up on a reread. He mentions many of the things & currents that are going on, but in such an off hand, tiny way that they're easily missed. If you read the prequel, Timediver's Dawn, even more becomes apparent even though Modesitt wrote it well after.

Like the other books I mentioned above, this one needs a reread to fully enjoy, I think. Zelazny is the king of that. His books have an obvious, decent story on the face, but a reread always turns up far more. After several discussions of A Night in the Lonesome October, I have over 20 pages of notes on that seemingly simple Halloween story. This one isn't nearly as complex nor as simple on the face, but it's got a lot packed into the terse prose.

The very first chapter casually mentions "slow glass" as a light source, which instantly triggered nostalgia. If you're interested, that's an invention of Bob Shaw in his 1966 short story Light of Other Days, which you can read freely courtesy of Baen: Light of Other Days . Nice story, well worth the time.

Still reading... Some random thoughts so far...

Time travel always makes my head hurt (well, almost always. Connie Willis's novels are an exception.)

This isn't Vietnam, this is science fiction. There are rules.

Sinopol Assignment

What's the rush? Baldur says they're about to lose the chance to buy this compact generator thing. These people time travel. Can't they go back to the same point in space/time a week from now, a month from now, next year? Well, eventually Loki has the same thought, and suggests there may be more to it, so I suppose I'll defer thought on this until I've finished the book.

Sinopol is a "duel-based society". They even have public dueling arenas scattered conveniently around the city. This means, Baldur tells us, people are honest, because even if you are really good duelist, if you keep getting into duels, eventually someone will kill you. (This is a variation on Heinlein's "an armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life" line?)

How then to account for the bully who obviously, deliberately engineers a duel with Loki? Wouldn't bullies tend to die out, eventually running into someone who kills them in a duel? (As, indeed, this one does. "Think of it as evolution in action." - Larry Niven.)

Minor Spoiler: After Loki does is little time-loop thing, Baldur comments bemusedly, “That means that because you made the switch earlier in real-time, you had to rescue me, which meant that you had to make the switch.” This should hardly be a new thought to an experienced member of the Temporal Guard.

This seems to be the "events are fixed and can't be changed by time travelers" theory of time travel, except the whole point of the Temporal Guard is that they wander around through space and time, apparently destroying any civilizations they think maybe come dangerous in the future. (By the way, since they time traveled, shouldn't they be able to do more than just suspect a society might become dangerous in the future? Much the same way Loki figured out which numbers would hit the jackpot in the Sinopol casino, so Baldur would know what to bet on.)

The alternate theory, from, e.g., Asimov's The End of Eternity, is that you can change time, causing new branches, but unlike what Loki did, you have to do them in subjective order. That is, you wouldn't encounter at current objective time T something you were going to do, but hadn't yet done in subjective time, at past objective time T-x.

Returning from Sinopol to Quest, Baldur arrives first, and Loki arrives later, because Loki spent more subjective time on Sinopol than Baldur. That's interesting, but since they are supposed to be time travelers, why can't Loki pick his breakout point earlier? (there is apparently a rule that you can't break out in a time where you've already been, but he hasn't been in any of the time since he left...)

Head hurts now...

I finished this yesterday. I am not too impressed, things don't seem to come together. It felt like a rought draft of a possibly good book.

I didn't get the time travel rules. Shouldn't they be like the laws of robotics? Simple, logical, with many ramifications.

I loved Connie Willis when she wrote about the Blitz!

Locators

Loki's time at the Locator Desk is interesting.

That tracking device everyone gets when their child is pretty amazing. It apparently can transmit a signal that can be received simultaneously across all time and space. Also, it seems to be able to know its location in both space and time, one heck of an intergalactic temporal positioning system.

Jim mentioned Roger Zelazny, and I'm beginning to agree that this is Zelazny's style of blending science and technology with magic and myth.

"I’d heard lots of talk about looping time to undo death, but you can’t do it. Dead is dead. The metaphysics of it consumes hundreds of pages of theory, but dead is dead."

Again the thought that time is fixed and actions constrained to not change things.

Domestic Affairs

I think I missed something about Loki's tenure at Southpoint. He arrests a drooling Peeping Tom/stalker. Then the rest of the Guard warns him, "Every punkout in Southpoint is going to try something now, just to prove that they're better than Domestic Affairs."

And that proves correct, as a succession of "punkouts" cost bombs and shoot laser beams at Loki in seemingly random and ill considered attacks.

First, I really didn't understand why?

Second, given the penalty for doing something like that is Hell and Chronowipe, what are these idiots thinking?

Immortals with everything they need available = ennui? That's the feeling I got about the punkouts. They need excitement.

Time is somewhat flexible - more so off Query than on it.

G333r write: What's the rush? This was never very clear to me either, although didn't Baldur or Loki mention something about Query becoming somehow out of phase or more distant from several neighbors, so that jumping to certain high/mid tech societies would be more difficult for most gods?

I thought the subjective time difference thingy (although it struck me as fairly arbitrary) was interesting when I thought it was a set-up for the reappearance of Ragnarok. But there ended up being SPOILERS no reappearance of granddad (although we learn the identity of great-granddad), no real explication of Freyda's past or agenda, no reappearance of the absentee parents & not even a declaration of the message they left on the bell.

The "once a personal acquaintance is dead, they're dead forever" trope struck me as strictly author convenience. There didn't seem to be any way to justify this applying only to Queryians the way it seems to for plot purposes.

Actually, the Sinopol episode strikes me as the most fleshed out in the books. The stakes are a little fuzzy because of the "why the rush?" issue, but we know the generator's important for the Guard or some faction of the Guard. We have two characters with different strategies for accomplishing the objectives (both of whom we want to survive the mission); we have hints that entire advanced culture could be on the line, or at least some interesting atmospherics provided by the fact that the High Sinopol culture is on the way to destroying itself. We have an alien culture that needs to be interacted with in more complex ways than by just throwing thunderbolts.

I'm not sure any other section of the novel is as satisfying as the High Sinopol trip. The various "first contact" type encouanters (with the blue swirls, for example) are interesting, but not for the Queryians -- too much work to try to communicate with the not-very-humanoid.

The ending of the novel definitely seemed rushed.

Hillary wrote: "What's the rush? This was never very clear to me either, although didn't Baldur or Loki mention something about Query becoming somehow out of phase or more distant from several neighbors, so that jumping to certain high/mid tech societies would be more difficult for most gods?..."

That's another confusing aspect of time travel in the novel. There seems to be some sort of anchor to your time of birth(?); Or maybe there's something magical about your subjective "now" on Query? Most of the Guards can only go back so far, and they can't extend that by setting up intermediate staging areas. If a Guard's limit is 100,000 years, you can't go back 100,000 years, take a rest and then go back another 100,000 years. However, several Guards use intermediate staging points to extend distance.



Hillary wrote: "I thought the subjective time difference thingy (although it struck me as fairly arbitrary) was interesting when I thought ..."

Connie Willis uses much the same idea with her Oxford Time Travelers series, though there time travel is technological, and it's explained that the machine maintains a link to the past for the purpose of retrieving the Historians, so a two-week visit to the dark ages takes two weeks in 2060, too.

Willis, on the other hand, doesn't do any "time twisting" (since the machine doesn't exist in the dark ages, you can't decide to go sometime else without first returning to 2060 Oxford.)

Is the fact that "gods" and "guards" are semi-homophones intentional?

As an observation, Loki may be the most methodical character in fantasy. Despite his "loose cannon" reputation in the Tower, when he decides to do something off the reservation, he certainly spends a lot of time collecting information, studying data and technology, setting up continuations and alternatives.

"Dr. Odd-Affection, clan practice"

cute.

Nadia wrote: "When you do read, let me know if you share my impression of there being hardly any thread between chapters. It feels as if each were part of an independently published piece."

There is definitely that feeling to the novel. There are a series of independent "adventures" Loki experiences with the Guards. They are separated by quite some time, sometimes decades, which Modesitt glosses over with a sentence or so, meaning we don't really feel the passage all at time. (Of course, when you're immortal, what's a decade or two?)

I think each of these adeventures is meant to show how Loki's opinion of the Guard develop. E.g., in Sinopol, he learns how the Guard obtains technology. The rescue mission to Anemone (blue swirls) shows Loki discovering new power as well as establishing that he's on the "intervene less" theory of time meddling, since he recommends sparing the inhabitants despite the fact they have some ability to see in paratime. Destroying the Sharks not only hones his power but shows his willingness to destroy when he thinks it's necessary. And his survey mission to the peaceful Gurlenians seems to seal his anger at the Tower for destroying anything that even might be a challenge to Query.

(I'm not sure what his assignment to Personnel was about, though.)