The Start of Eternity/How the story was written

Introduction
This is a description of how The Start of Eternity was created.

The End of Eternity
Isaac Asimov's time travel novel, The End of Eternity, was published in 1955. I'm not sure when I read The End of Eternity, but it was probably around 1976. It was fun to imagine that time travelers from the future such as Noÿs Lambent and Andrew Harlan might have lived out their lives in the 20th century.

One of the interesting features of The End of Eternity is that it is a story about time travel in which the technology for time travel is thrown away. Humanity is shown abandoning the use of time travel, but we have to wonder: if time travel was invented once, would anything prevent it from being invented again?

Asimov has often been criticized for his one-dimensional characters. Noÿs was a rather amazing character for the 1950s. She was a smart and sexually-liberated secret agent from the far future. After introducing us to Noÿs, Asimov never told us enough: in what kinds of ways would a woman from 10,000,000 years in the future differ from us?

Foundation's Edge
In Foundation's Edge (1982) Asimov mentioned the idea that "Eternals" had used their time travel technology to select a Reality in which humans would spread through the galaxy. I read Foundation's Edge in the mid 80s and was intrigued by the possibility that Asimov might some day write another story about Noÿs and Andrew and their adventures in the 20th century. In The End of Eternity Asimov wrote about Noÿs and Andrew using their knowledge from the future to stimulate the development of space travel technology. What other kinds of changes would they have caused to the course of history?

Foundation and Earth
Asimov did eventually link his robot stories to the [[Wikipedia:Foundation series|Foundation Saga. In addition to including the telepathic robot Daneel, Asimov wrote human telepaths into the Foundation Saga.

I've long been interested in the possibility that Noÿs had "mentalic" abilities. In The End of Eternity, Andrew rather mysteriously has a "revelation" about the existence of a time loop which, in essence, allows time travelers to make time travel possible. Did Noÿs telepathically plant that startling idea in Andrew's mind? However, another possibility is that telepathic robots like Daneel were involved in the destruction of Eternity.

In addition to showing that the galaxy was heading towards formation of a "group mind", Galaxia, Asimov raised the specter of aliens from other galaxies (Foundation and Earth, 1986). If time travel was used to make the Milky Way a "humans only club" then what would prevent aliens from using time travel in a similar way? Isn't it inevitable that the universe would degenerate into a time travel war? Is there any way to absolutely make it impossible for time travel to be used?

Unfortunately Asimov was taken from us before he had a chance to extend the Foundation Saga beyond the events that were depicted in Foundation and Earth. How would Asimov have written aliens into the Foundation Saga?

The Start of Eternity
In 2005 I started experimenting with fan fiction. Not long after that, I started playing around with the idea that it might be possible to write a fan fiction sequel to Asimov's The End of Eternity. I re-read the story and wrote down some ideas for a sequel. I started thinking about ways to develop the idea that telepathic robots had been the creators of Eternity but eventually those robots realized time travel was a problem. In order to prevent aliens from taking over the galaxy, the robots made use of Noÿs as their secret agent who could destroy Eternity and make sure that space travel technology was developed in the 20th century. At first, I toyed with the idea that Noÿs could have also been involved in the creation of Eternity.

The Start of Eternity is a fan fiction story that explores the relationship between Asimov's time travel novel (The End of Eternity) and his Foundation Saga. The sections below describe the development of The Start of Eternity from when I started working on at this wiki in 2008.

2008
Noÿs, as a secret agent who interfered with the function of Eternity (actually, she made use of Andrew to destroy Eternity) and the Second Foundationers (with their mentalic powers) were important influences on my thinking about a solution to the Fermi paradox. I like to imagine that aliens with human-like minds evolved long ago on distant planets and have existed as a space-faring civilization for hundreds of millions of years. How would such beings interact with creatures on other worlds like Earth? I like to imagine that such hypothetical beings might1) have some rules that limit the ways they interact with more primitive civilizations and2) have advanced technology that from our perspective would be indistinguishable from magic. My first ideas for The Start of Eternity that I wrote down at this wiki back in 2008 included the idea of aliens from another galaxy discovering the existence of telepathic robots who had the power to travel in time.