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Asimov was upholding after nearly twenty years of writing science fiction. It may also provide clues to his decision to leave the fantasy world of fiction writing for the real world of science writing.
The End of Eternity shares with other Asimov fiction his basic concern for intelligent choice. Although Harlan begins as a cold and withdrawn Eternal, apparently moved only by intellectual concerns and sharing the values of a group that can change other people's Realities and lives at will, and although Harlan changes only because of his love for Nos, reason still wins out over emotion. In the final chapter, Harlan is persuaded by Nos's rational arguments, not by his love for her. Out of resentment that his love has been manipulated, Harlan has made up his mind to kill Nos, but when he matches his own experience with Nos's accusations, he is persuaded.
In another sense, perhaps, Asimov's old science-fiction enthusiasms may have emerged victorious over his rationality. After her comments on Eternity's choosing safety and mediocrity, Nos says, "The real solutions . . . come from conquering difficulty, not avoiding it." Carried to their ultimate conclusion, these statements, which Asimov implicitly accepted for the sake of the novel, imply that humanity cannot improve its lot by rational choice. Or perhaps, if Asimov were given credit for dealing with a special case, they mean only that humanity cannot change the past.
If one wished to personalize the message of the novel, one might speculate that Asimov, looking back over his own past, had concluded that no amount of tinkering would have changed it for the better. This is, indeed, one of the messages of his autobiographical writings. Everything happened for the best: Campbell's early rejections, Sam Merwin's rejection of "Grow Old with Me," the change of administration at the Boston University School of Medicine that led to his full-time writing (which still awaited him). . . . If he had had the opportunity to make things happen differently, he might have made the wrong choice, he might have said, might have chosen safety and mediocrity over risk and greatness. In The End of Eternity, at least, Asimov chose, as rationally as he could, uncertainty over certainty and infinity over not eternity but Eternity, that is, over the limitation of man's possibilities by too much tinkering with them. Asimov was not denying humanity's potential for rationality or the need for considering choices rationally but humanity's capacity to play God. Humanity will not consciously choose the uncertainty of adventure, or the adventure of uncertainty.
Within two years Asimov was to turn away from the certainty of science fiction to the uncertainty of science writing as well as from the

 
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