Challenge 355 Response

“A Temporal Flashback”

by Bertil Falk

Maybe this is a reply to Don’s Challenge question:

Can Bertil Falk’s “A Temporal Feedback” be said to have neither a beginning nor an end? Does the story play a trick on the reader or does it make a legitimate joke with narrative structure?"

As to the formula I have created for my occasional bilocation stories featuring Billie Occasion, my ambition is that instead of a striking punchline I want to have something that may well be experienced as a let-down.

In the first story, “A Case for Billie Occasion,” the readers probably want a solution to the strange murder. Even though that solution is implied as a possibility in the story, it is not the important thing, as the puzzled customer of Bille Occasion points out.

If the reader gets disappointed at the end of the Billie Occasion stories, I have been very successful. If they accept the not very exciting endings, I have been less successful. If they love the lack of solutions, I have failed.

Bertil

Hardly “failed,” Bertil ! Rather, truly Bewildering. As the very title “A Temporal Feedback” says, the story is based on the fundamental circular logic of time-travel: the effect is its own cause. The story, then, may be a subset of the genre “It was all a dream,” because the plot comes full circle and effectively cancels itself out.

Let’s say you own the premise, Bertil, by right of talent and seniority. If anyone else wants to try a turn on the merry-go-round plot, you can be sure we’ll look very hard at it. Anyone else will have to come up with at least as interesting a character as Billie Occasion, and that’s a tall order.

Don