Monday, February 22, 2010

The Time Traveler's Wife

I think I should reverse my technique of always reading the book before the movie....reading the book before hand usually leaves me disappointed about the movie. Now that I've read the book following the movie for the first time, not only was I so excited to read the book, I am BLOWN AWAY by the book itself. The Time Traveler's Wife book is only about 1 million times better than the movie. I thought the movie was great....but now I think, if I was the author, I'd be insulted by the movie. The book has so much more depth and color and, though a bit darker than the movie, is also much more intelligent. Wow.

I love time travel books. I think if I ever wrote a fiction novel, I'd want it to be about time travel. The idea just fascinates me. The rules in this book are a bit different than in others I've read in that there's a complete absence of the whole Butterfly Effect panic associated with meeting your former self in the past or your self-to-be in the future. It runs with the idea that everything only ever happens one way and so everything is the way it is. You can't change anything. It's kind of a pre-destination sort of thing that doesn't entirely make sense to me. Because they say, in the book, that you still have the freedom to make choices, but you will only make a choice once. For instance, you choose to read this blog. The idea is that, no matter how many times you come back in time to try to stop yourself, your future self would be blocked from doing anything to keep you from reading this blog. You've made the choice to read it, and so that's the way it will happen every time. Any person from the future is incapable of intervening. It's like instead of the analogy where the whole of time is like an infinite piece of string, the past, present, and future all exist at once. Your present is the past of your future self and your future is the past of an even later future self.....so even if a past you goes forward in time to intervene with something, in their mind, that hasn't happened yet, it HAS happened to an even furthur future self so say, if someone was meant to die and you were trying to prevent it, no matter what direction you come from to try to stop it, past or future, it will happen when it's supposed to happen the exact way it was meant to happen and you'd find yourself incapable of intervening in any way because things are what they are.....

Very very lengthy explanation, but I thought it was interesting enough to share. I love speculative/science fiction and really encourage everyone to read this book. ha.

2 comments:

  1. I really enjoyed that movie! I really should read the book, it's just hard to find the time!

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  2. that is my favorite book...of.all.time :)

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