TTimescales

• MLP: FiM
• Romance
• Sad
• Sci-Fi

A tragic cutting short of a budding romance. A confession of time travel and incurable disease. What was left behind. An instant, a lifetime, millions of years. Three timescales. Two timelines. One love story.

• Death
• OC
• Maud Pie
• Starlight Glimmer
• Boulder

Bicyclette · 12k words  ·  53  6 · 744 views

 

Description 

A tragic cutting short of a budding romance. A confession of time travel and incurable disease. What was left behind. An instant, a lifetime, millions of years. Three timescales. Two timelines. One love story.

Initial Thoughts

Hey, it’s got Maud, Starlight, and Boulder. 

And death. 

Uh oh.

Summary + Immediate Reaction (Because This Story Warranted One)

Ah, buck. Buck buck bucking buck buck buck I should not have been listening to “Itsumo Nando Demo” (Always With Me) while reading this ooooooooh buck man buck

You want a summary? I dunno, here. It’s a story about Maud and Starlight and love and time travel and existential decay and endurance of the qualities that best define or best destroy that which has the potential to live and then to die. I don’t know. This is a story that I cannot, in good conscience, provide an adequate summary for - it’s an experience that needs to be done blindly. You want a summary? You have to read this story for yourself. That’s the summary. 

BUCK

Plot

I got massive Kurt Vonnegut vibes from this one. Not only from the science-fiction angle, but the wonderfully dry yet paradoxically warm commentary on the psychology of the story, on its premise, on its themes, so on and so forth. 

In accordance with such a comparison, the plot, then, is both complicated in its ideas but simple in its execution. As its first chapter indicates, this will be a story about diverging timelines, but instead of focusing on the science of it, it will explore a certain event as perceived by certain ponies as it differs from one other timeline. That event is, of course, Starlight’s untimely demise in one universe, and how another Starlight comes to grips with both taking that Starlight’s place, and the inevitability of Maud Pie’s death in either timeline.. But this, while taking up the main “setting” of the story (to speak loosely), isn’t the conflict that drives it. The actual story, really, is a love story, between Maud and Starlight. And it’s a love story that spans more than words and plots and stories, more than years and ages and aeons. It’s a love story about, well, timeless love, I suppose, whether or not the author meant it in that way. 

In this way, we can divide the story into three sections, as it itself has done, and evaluate love through this lens. The first chapter, Neurological, is deeply scientific and (pardon the pun) cerebral. But it has to be: as said in the third and last chapter, one of the methods by which “love” appears is through brain activity. The second chapter, Biographical, takes love as a “story,” relatively speaking: it’s love through the eyes of Starlight and Maud, and in this way is a fairly traditional, if wholly science-fiction-esque, kind of romance. The third chapter returns us to the scientific avenue, but with the added twist of taking place millions of years in the future, with a character looking back on time through geological phenomena, and observing as we have observed the intelligent and emotional evolution of love in action, in the skeletons of Maud and Starlight.

Love, in this traditional way, is depicted as much as one would expect it, but against the backdrop and oncoming ground of science - as the chapters one and three indiciate by their titles - it somehow accumulates not just extra meaning, but increased resonance. The somewhat ironic science that precedes chapter two and which constitutes a large part of chapter three do not diminish chapter two’s importance in the story: rather, structurally, they highlight the importance of its theme, and therefore the story’s. 

Loss is the other prevalent theme, and it shows up in all the ways one can imagine. There’s the loss of one Starlight Glimmer. Then there’s the loss of Maud Pie. But then there’s also the loss of the name and memory of Starlight in the third chapter, and the loss of her connection to Maud. There’s the loss of the meaning that might have been found between them, which results in only conjecture about who they were, what they meant to each other. (Sidenote: the author’s own thematic commentary, found in a related blog post, proved immensely helpful to ordering some of these observations around. But I suggest no one read it until the story is done and this review has been considered.)

And still, there are others. Geology, infinity, the endurance of things, the preservation of things, time, experience, wisdom, existence, more and more, perhaps more than either the author or myself could have imagined.

So, the themes present are strong. They are no doubt familiar as they are made strange again. And the plot, for its complexity, remains simple, even if it requires some mental work to not just understand, but contemplate the larger meanings. 

None of this is to say that the story is a difficult read. I believe you can read it as a simple love story just as much as you can read it as a larger metaphor for… something. The best part is that you can choose that something. I’ve chosen love and loss, which I believe is mostly supported by the text, but Bicyclette could choose something else. I believe, however, that this feeds into my larger takeaway: that this is a story about, on some level, unknowability, but perhaps, even more importantly, the acceptance thereof. 

Perhaps it's fitting that this section of the review consists largely of going around in circles, praising and pointing but not quite demonstrating as clearly as I would want it to, the intricacy of this story, the experience of its plot, how it all comes together in such a wonderful, intellectual mix. 

Look here. It’s really good. I enjoyed its uniqueness, and I enjoyed where it went. 

Score - 10 / 10 

Characterization

There aren’t many, but then again, it’s hard to say where the line between a character and a non-character starts and ends. 

Our two main characters, that of Starlight and Maud, are definitely the most well-rendered. The story’s second chapter sets them against one another in a believable and entertaining way… which makes the reveal of what mystery surrounds the story’s premise all the more heart-wrenching. Bicyclette has done an excellent job of writing both the self-loathing and mental gymnastics of Starlight Glimmer as she tries desperately to justify, really, herself, and the calm reassurance of a stoic pony such as Maud in the face of certain kinds of oblivion. 

But we also have the presence of an omnipotent narrator. They may be Bicyclette or a substitute for the author, or otherwise some other kind of entity. Their presence in the story is, really, to get the words out, to narrate what happens without the constraints of POV or time. Yet I don’t think we can actively say the narrator isn’t a character. It does do something to the story: it brings the reader to it far more intimately than we might have expected. In this way, the narrator seems to be able to render the story as not a story, but as an experience. 

It’s a special kind of character, then, whose classification I don’t really know. But I do know that authors like Vonnegut are fond of inputting the first-person narrator as part of the narration even if that person doesn’t actually show up in the story itself. 

(Sidenote: one could maybe make the argument that this omnipotent narrator is Boulder.) 

We also receive two OCs, Grasping Hands and Moving Finger, who show up at the story’s end (which takes place millions of years after the end of Equestria). They don’t quite have much to them, to be frank. Their names aren’t their own; they’re things that the narrator gives them for the reader’s convenience. And neither, to a great extent, do anything to elaborate upon the story’s plot. What they function as, however, is another avenue of explanation for the story’s many ideas, and pressingly, the idea of not really knowing the truth of the story that they’ve uncovered. 

They are scientists who have yet to be seduced by nature’s assertion that there really isn’t much that we know out there, only what we assume to know; things that the scientific method would demonstrate to us in the ideal scenario. They are, coincidentally, part of a geological study, engaged in theories about this pre-time, talking about ponies, about the many ways the past has endured, in the soil, in the dirt, in the rocks, in the bones… 

My point is that I’m not sure I would consider them well-rounded characters. They are, rather, flat, and they don’t really exist in the story’s plot so much as the narrator, in a way, invents them to explore the story further. This is, no doubt, an ironic assessment given the nature of stories. 

But I point this out because I think it’s necessary to note that they serve their function well. Through what is told about them and through the narrator manipulating what we see of them and how we see them act, the story’s many thematic elements crystalize and come to form. In a way, it’s fitting that the story should end with paleontologists working to uncover the past, failing to recognize what it is, save for one, Grasping Hands, who, through neither effort nor fault of her own, was touched by the story’s main argument: what will last through the end of time, if not the love of creatures so fortunate to have known each other? 

At this point, though, I fear I’d be nitpicking. For the characters who are traditionally characters, Bicyclette has rendered them well. For everything else, sprinkles and touches and sparkles aside, they’ve managed their purpose wonderfully, and the story greatly benefits from them being there.

Score - 10 / 10 

Syntax

There were some instances where I noted that punctuation for dialogue was off. For example:

“Don’t.” Maud interrupted. “Never apologize for laughing when I’m trying to get you to laugh. I’ve always loved your laugh.”

There shouldn’t have been a period after “Don’t,” since what follows isn’t an action, but a dialogue tag. Such an issue pops up a lot in the second chapter, but that’s largely because the second chapter is, itself, a traditional story more-or-less. 

Another issue was the scientific jargon. It wasn’t that bad in the first chapter (despite my utter unfamiliarity with neurological terms and definitions), but in the third chapter, it perhaps became a bit monotonous at times. Some instances of geological terminology flew over my head no matter how much I read them, and in this way, though I enjoyed what the third chapter ending up being, it was by far the more difficult of the three. 

This is both the fault of and not the fault of the author. It’s the fault because a conscious decision was made to use geological terminology not only to enhance the experience through metaphorical connotation, but provide authenticity for the occupations of the characters that show up in chapter three. But it’s also not quite the fault of the author, because science-fiction has always suffered from sometimes difficult concepts and language. There’s only so much of an explanation for a certain field before a story becomes a lab report, and that’s not always as fun.

Even so, there were moments—loving moments—where Bicyclette demonstrates great control and energy of the pace and flow of sentences. I love this one sentence from chapter three:

So did the zebras and the griffons and the cats and the dragons and the hippogriffs and the donkeys and the goats and the yaks and the changelings and the dragonequui and all of the sentient species who inhabited the planet in the time period we are familiar with now.

Those who love grammar might decry this and say, How dare there be no commas in such a lengthy list! But listen to the flow, listen to the beat. The polysyndeton, the multiple use of “and,” provides a certain linguistic flavor. And, moreover, the sentence isn’t difficult. It really is just a list of items (species, really) with a brief qualifier - who inhabited the planet… and so on. Yet, it sings, doesn’t it? One doesn’t get lost. One feels gently guided by a narrator who knows how to string a bunch of words together to get this sense of time passing. 

There were other examples of this kind of control all throughout the story, and it’s something I simply have to applaud Bicyclette for. In the midst of some of the heavier, much more corporeal ideas and sentences, the musicality allowed me to understand without fully reminiscing upon certain points. The unknowability of language faded to make way for the experience of language, and, after reading this story, I can’t say that that isn’t a little bit fitting.

Score - 9 / 10

Final Score - ( 10 + 10 + 9 ) / 3 = 9.67

Final Thoughts

I’m reminded of a line from the movie, Interstellar:

Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can't understand it.

This story is unknowable. Yet it is also knowable for that same reason. I find that that’s part of the story’s charm and which even contributes to its excellence. One of the core questions raised by the end of the story is, How much can we actually know about love, or our past, or the ancestors, or anything, really? It’s wholly unknown, and while the story plays around with entertaining explanations all throughout, there isn’t really anything to suggest a concrete answer to everything. 

But that’s part of the point, in some ways, at least as I’ve interpreted it. If the theme of this story - the core one - is this conceptual experiment with love, then it follows that we can only conceive of it so far. At some point or another, there can be no more considerations made. We must either die, or experience it in some capacity. (Did I mention this story has me feeling existential? It does, but that’s a lovely thing sometimes). Love and stories and time, and the intermingling of all those things in this experience we call life, do not demonstrate a clear and absolute conviction towards reason or sanity. They happen, as many things do, but the joy is not in figuring them out so much as realizing they exist and that we have the chance to have them, too. 

Or something. 

This, no doubt, is vague to say, and hard to explain. This story is a mental exercise, but one that oozes creativity and heart. One gets the sense of a tightly wound yarn, down to the acts and sequences and narrative techniques that Bicyclette has played around with. It’s warm, that’s what I’m saying, I think. It’s incredibly warm, and despite the sadness, it’s reassuring in this way. 

<For archive purposes: 9.67 / 10>

Moved response to a story comment. Thanks so much for the review!

Oh, and I've no intention for submitting this for a review, but in case you were interested in more, I did a short sequel that looked into Boulder's ultimate fate, where the only character is the narrator voice that your review pointed out. That narrator voice is the strongest in this fic because of that, I think. If you do end up reading it, I hope that you enjoy it!

TCosmological

• MLP: FiM
• Romance
• Sad
• Sci-Fi

Boulder's journey into the cosmological future of Equestria, and what he took with him.

• Death
• OC
• Maud Pie
• Starlight Glimmer
• Boulder

Bicyclette · 1.1k words  ·  46  5 · 550 views