Could anything become normal?
“Even time travel becomes normal when it’s your day job.”
A line from the novel Permafroat by Alastair Reynolds.
So far, this is one of the most interesting time travel novels I’ve ever read. (The most interesting time travel book I’ve ever read was The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.)
Anyway, after I read that line in Permafrost, I remembered two things:
- Rob Bell talks about how complex concepts/ideas can become natural and normal and how important it is to remember what it was like when they were new novels if you’re going to teach about them.
- Something I read in one of The Expance books, where the character James Holden is floating in space toward another ship. At first, he is scared out of his mind because of everything that could go wrong. But the ship is far away, and the drift towards it takes hours. After a time, the character calms down and comments on how there is a physical limit to how much: how long a body can be freaking out.