2000x/Beyond 2000: By His Bootstraps (Based on a story by Robert A. Heinlein)

[james_davis_nicoll]

By His Bootstraps

if that does not work, go here and look around.

Graduate student Bob Wilson is interrupted in mid-thesis by a man whose face is oddly familiar. In short order he finds himself caught up in nested causal loops, forced to play out an assortment of different roles in the same events.

Was this the first causal loop story?

The production values on this are quite good, with the cost, I believe of making the file size comparatively Brobdingnagian. Similarly, Dreyfus does a nice job of conveying what a dim-witted, self-centered asshole Wilson is, worse even that that jackass from The Door Into Summer. The entire plot rests on two things: that Bob is consistently incapable of recognizing himself (or remembering that he has this issue) and that he is the sort of person who will seduce a young woman with false promises knowing he is planning on legging it for the 30,000 so he can rule an entire planet. "Ruling" in this case seems to consist of letting the people of the future (or at least their more attractive women) wait on him hand and foot. We can only hope for a The Man Who Would Be King ending in Bob's future.

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comment(s); comment here or there.

Comments

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

As Diktor, The Next Iteration, doesn't show up at the end to ensure Bob makes it through the next twenty years or so ... it looks like he doesn't.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

At least in the radio play, Bob is very gun shy about using the gate unnecessarily because of a passing encounter with one of the beings that created the gate.

[bunsen-h.livejournal.com]

In the original, that "passing encounter" was just a momentary glimpse through the viewer. Was that changed in the radio version?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

No, but that glimpse was enough to get him to stop using the gate for a long time.

[bunsen-h.livejournal.com]

If Dreyfus managed to let the listener keep all of the Bobs sorted out, I'm impressed.

[michaelgr.livejournal.com]

In Heinlein stories, time travel has the unfortunate effect of turning the traveler into a motherfucking asshole. Sometimes literally.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

+100

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Edward Page Mitchell's ``The Clock That Went Backward'', from 1881, seems to technically qualify as a causal loop story: a couple folks go back to the Siege of Leyden in 1574 and save the day for the Dutch and, as they exposition earlier in the story, the ideas of religious liberty and the right of people to self-government of the people might have been crushed.

This feels a bit loose for a proper casual loop story, though. I tend to think of that minigenre as requiring the course of events to be more personal: making sure the protagonist grows up the way he remembers, as opposed to making sure his country develops rightly. (On the other hand, there is Mack Reynolds's ``Compounded Interest'', which for my money is one of the best of these, and that's almost Olaf-Stapledonian in its impersonality.)