Re: Old Tea Leaf Reviews 15: 1995 Locus Poll Best First Novel

William December Starr wrote:

In article
<d0924ae2-d7e4-4451-8a4a-43601d677af1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
sigidunum@xxxxxxxxx said:

As to _Days of Cain_ [by J.R. Dunn], it has its problems, but
it's an SFnal treatment of the Holocaust that isn't stupid,
mawkish, cranky, or falling into any of the other obvious
traps. That's no small accomplishment.

IMS the central premise of the book boiled down to something like
"God help us, this is in fact one of the best of all possible
worlds": there's no way to eliminate the Holocaust without making
even worse stuff happen down the line. This is not a cheerful
point of view but I don't find it implausible. YMMV.

At least -- and this is spoiler, assuming I recall it correctly --
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the Time Patrol Overlords At the End of Time had a project underway
to shoot a datastream through the bottleneck between this universe
and the next one to come, which would affect the formation of
Universe_next so as to encode some degree of "Hey, don't do ***
like impaling babies on bayonets, okay?" morality right into its
fundamental laws. So their "We can't let you change history out
from under us because that would be bad" rule wasn't self-serving
fertilizer; they actually had a good reason for preserving
themselves.

Which leads to a question that I find obvious: What did their
equivalents in the universe before ours do along those lines? What
moral rules did they write into the fundamental laws of our universe?

--
Dan Goodman
"I have always depended on the kindness of stranglers."
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Expire
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