"Billy Pilgrim ... “comes unstuck in time” and begins to experience chronology the way Tralfamadorians do, he understands why his captors find comical the notion of free will."
The belief that time is linear is not universal. Another fictional take on 'eternal recurrence' is explored in Ouspensky's 1915 Strange Life of Ivan Osokin. The protagonist becomes conscious of having lived the same life repeatedly, and struggles to fix his mistakes.
It's a valuable metaphor, though I reject the concern that the timeline of every quark is scripted.
The related quote is the one part I remember and thought about most from the book:
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. [...] When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.
I remember this idea brought to the logical extreme (though I don't remember author's name).
A character gets born, lives, dies, repeatedly, in different circumstances. At one.moment he manages to remember something that a being from outside time tells him between incarnations, in "limbo" / "bardo" type of setting.
All the people in the world is that same character, only transpoted in time. All the worst villains he faces are himself, all the best saints he meets are his (future) selves. This world is entirely by him.
The protagonist becomes conscious of having lived the same life repeatedly, and struggles to fix his mistakes.
Abbreviated weeb version: Re:Zero. Also, All you need is Kill. (Aweebrviated?)
It's a valuable metaphor, though I reject the concern that the timeline of every quark is scripted.
Let's say I implement a huge, immersive, highly emergent video game, where all of the entity states are recorded, but all of the random number generation is constantly seeded by a feed from CloudFlare's lava lamps. I could present the entire history of my toy universe as a single, static 4 dimensional data object. I could even save that data on a 2D surface, then set the archive as a physical object on my mantelpiece. Yet the timeline of every entity in that toy universe wasn't scripted.
The belief that time is linear is not universal. Another fictional take on 'eternal recurrence' is explored in Ouspensky's 1915 Strange Life of Ivan Osokin. The protagonist becomes conscious of having lived the same life repeatedly, and struggles to fix his mistakes.
It's a valuable metaphor, though I reject the concern that the timeline of every quark is scripted.