Originally printed Final Stage (1975)
Read for Short Story Monday over at The Book Mine Set
Caught in a time loop, knowing they would die over and over again, three ‘tempunauts’ try to figure out how not to. One of them thinks he has the solution. Is it a solution to a real problem, or has he gone mad?
What does eternity mean to you: living throughout time watching everything change around you while you remain the same? What if the only “eternity” you can guarantee, is to pick a section of time and re-live it forever? Would this be a gift, a blessing – or a curse? If you had to decide, which would you chose?
This short story examines the possibility and the choice but in such a subtle way, it wasn’t until after re-reading it, then letting it mull over in my mind that I came up with those questions. Perhaps you will see something different.
According to the author:
In this story I felt a vast weariness over the space program, which had thrilled us so at the start — especially the first lunar landing — and then had been forgotten and virtually shut down, a relic of history. I wondered, if time-travel became a ‘program’, would it suffer the same fate? Or was there an even worse possibility latent in it, within the very nature of the paradoxes of time-travel?
That is the great thing about good stories such as this. To wonder about the potentialities of what the author was writing about; given just enough information to think about things and not have the author tell me what I should be thinking all along.
Rating short stories for me is always a challenge as I must tweak my system a bit to accommodate the format. They must be more intuitively derived. As such, I am giving this story a 4 Star rating as I cannot truly say it knocked my socks off. But I loved the writing and the fact the author did not get too technical thus distracting the reader away from the story.
This is my first time reading Philip K. Dick. It will NOT be my last.
To relive the same moment over and over sounds like one of the circles in Dante’s hell. *shivers* If I had to choose, I’m definitely one for sticking around and watching as the world progress and changes.
I’ve been reading a collection of Philip Dick’s short stories for almost a year (wow, has it really been that long) and he’s definitely gifted. It’s really easy to see why so many movies are based on his short stories.
I’ve always like PKD (except for A Scanner Darkly, which I just couldn’t get into). Definitely a writer ahead of his time.