Easy!? time travel is complicated to even ponder let alone make a logical tied together story containing it. Even Back to the Future only works with the delorian as a method to prevent paradoxal actions itself, it conserves history by action or failure of action(usually in the motor lol).
So I don't buy that time travel is easy.... go watch the Gobs of star trek episodes containing TT and come back when you can explain them all to me lol, cause i'm still scratching my head over a few.
I wasn't clear. I'm not saying that the stories are easy to tell, I'm saying that time travel, as a plot device, is an easy way to handwave literally any ongoing mystery in a long-running series. Proven Guilty's hanging threads? Time travel. Who blew up Murphy's car in White Night? Time traveler. Who is Cowl? A time traveler. Hell, I remember people wondering if Harry was killed at the end of Changes by a time traveler.
The mechanics can be as complicated as you like, which can complicate the story in which it is used, or as straight forward (ish) as Bill and Ted. But you can tie up every single loose end in any story with a sci-fi or fantasy setting by applying time travel to it. That's what I'm talking about. I'm not saying it's easy to tell a twisty time travel story. I've done it. It's not particularly fun, and I won't be doing it again.
Not Time Travel. While that is something we very much have to deal with (like it or not) because it's an established part of the setting. No, Im just talking about Foresight, either basic intelligence-based or in Vadderungs case Long-established Mythical Precognition.
It carries some of the same pitfalls and headaches I admit, but skips a lot of others.
Yeah, I was using time travel as a comparison; I don't like foresight as an explanation for similar reasons I dislike time travel as an explanation. Most things can be explained by saying, "Well, so-and-so predicted that this was going to happen, and arranged things so that it happened a certain way." The wheels-within-wheels stuff may be a bit complex to lay out, with Batman Gambits aplenty, and it can make for some cool scenes and establishing character moments, but as an explanation to dangling plot questions, I find it lacking. It's almost a cop out in some regards.
I've also written prophesy books, and that is also something I won't be doing again. Too difficult to make it interesting when prophecy twists are so commonplace everybody looks for them the moment a prophecy is made. Most readers are savvy enough to realize that prophecies will be True From a Certain Point of View, so that twist you think is going to be awesome just falls flat. Better writers than me might be able to do something original with them, (like a prophecy bait-and-switch; you think it's about Character X, but it's
really about Character Y) but I've had my fill of those types of devices for my own material. Lady in the Water tried and failed to do something like that.
Foresight isn't quite the same animal, and it's established well enough in the Dresden Files by characters like Rashid, Odin, Mab, Marcone (to an extent), Lara, and a few others I'm forgetting for it to be reasonably believable. It gives you a lot more wiggle room, since the characters aren't blatantly claiming, "X will happen," they're simply arranging pieces so that it does, and you only find out about it later. I'd still prefer a different explanation, because, again, it feels like a cop out when you discover, "Oh my stars, everything was arranged by X," or "X and Y worked together to manipulate everything and I am just a cosmic plaything."
See, the reveal about Uriel having a delicate hand in Small Favor was really effective, because it came out of freaking nowhere. Mr. Sunshine was a character who subtly shaped events in the background, and nobody would have known he was involved at all if he didn't choose to reveal himself to Harry. The twist there wasn't that Harry was manipulated, it was that there was another player not even on the board, but
above it, playing a totally different game altogether.
Anywho, I'm not saying at all that Jim can't take the above things and turn them into interesting stories or incorporate them into the existing narrative in a cool way, because I have way too much respect for him as a writer and a nerd to get things right. I'm speaking in general terms, I dislike them as plot devices because, in the hands of too many, less able writers (including myself here), they simply don't work out, and I'd prefer that the overarching narrative not rely on time travel or foresight to be the primary driving force behind too many dangling threads.
