Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Time Travel

In the earliest drafts of the story that became "All the Time in Our World", the two young people were only propelled a few hundred years in the future. The world looked really different, but in one of the few "scenes" I remember vividly, Edward manages to pull a tile off a wall and discovers copper wiring within. Up until then, they had thought they were on another planet, but that made him start thinking that maybe they were on Earth.

Over the years, as I wrote and re-wrote the story, I kept moving it further into the future and making our world more and more of a forgotten memory. There's no big message here of me predicting nuclear war or WWIII or anything like that. Mostly, as alluded to in an earlier post, it's about the cyclical nature of things and hubris. It is the way of cultures to eventually disappear. I make no concrete prediction as to what will be the Unites States' (and modern culture in general) reason for falling, but we will eventually. To think we won't is to have no grasp of history.

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