Storytelling conventions make it hard for people to assimilate events like the Kennedy assassination. Many folks want to believe that Larger Forces were at work, and Stephen King’s narrative choice emphasizes this:

if you’re going to try and undo a watershed event in history—the assassination of JFK, say—you had better be determined. Because the past will do its best to remain unchanged.

And yet in truth, had Oswald missed, JFK would have remained un-shot. There was nobody on the grassy knoll to protect History.

November 3, 2011 at 10:34 am

ben

And yet in truth, had Oswald missed, JFK would have remained un-shot. There was nobody on the grassy knoll to protect History.

Evidently you didn’t RTFA: “There are these guardians who stand watch over all the time portals, because they understand that whenever you go back, you damage the time-space continuum.”

November 3, 2011 at 4:43 pm

Malaclypse

“There are these guardians who stand watch over all the time portals, because they understand that whenever you go back, you damage the time-space continuum.”

Tom Baker knows what to do about the Guardians. Best Doctor Ever.

November 4, 2011 at 12:32 pm

Dave

That has to be the most handwave-otastic discussion of time-travel paradoxes EVAR!!11!!

Has Stephen King become so much of a “novelist” now that he can pretend the whole genre doesn’t exist?

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