On Spoilers in Doctor Who

[danieldwilliam]

Doctor Who and River have a relationship that runs in different directions. From River’s point of view she is meeting the Doctor as she gets older and he gets younger. And vice versa.

They have an agreement about no spoilers. Neither tells the other what they know about the future of the other one.

This presumably happens a lot to Timelords and those who associate with them.

Occasionally bits of future knowledge explicitly leak out (character A hands offers character B a drink they don’t drink, yet).  More subtly how people behave when they know something is likely to be different than how they behave when they don’t know that thing.  Therefore information about the Doctor’s future, held by River, could leak out based on how she behaves when they are together or the topics she avoids.

Thinking about Cryptonomicon and Enigma and the suspiciously successful and efficient RAF reconnaissance flights it should be possible for someone to work out something about their future from looking at the behaviour of people travelling in different directions or at different speeds in their timelines. Quite a bit if you put a lot of effort into it and had several different sources to work from.

Comments

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

I loved Hyperion because it was so damn clever (in much the same way that Cryptonomicon is clever) and I enjoyed his pastiches of different types of SF (and even of different authors). The sequels provided diminishing turns, and I stopped reading him. My loss, probably. The chapter I was thinking of in Hyperion was the one with the space traveller and his planet bound lover.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Yes – reading wikipedia and reminding myself of the contents I did very much enjoy that one.

I like the Olympus books, especially the bits that follow the Trojan war on Mars but I found the ending a bit poor.

But I would struggle to recommend them, because, in some ways the fact that parts of the book are so good makes the weaker endings more frustrating.