39,327
edits
Timeline-Altering MacGuffin: Difference between revisions
m
update links
m (update links) |
m (update links) |
||
Line 33:
* This trope is played around with in ''[[The Pendragon Adventure]]''. Generally, taking an item from one territory to another is said to cause disaster and allow Saint Dane to win. This first occurs in ''The Merchant of Death'', the very first book, when Bobby ignores this warning and {{spoiler|gives the Milago tribe all the necessary parts to make an atomic bomb}}. Saint Dane is sometimes shown as doing this as well, such as in ''Black Water'' where he {{spoiler|uses a poison from another territory to try and poison the locals}}, but in the very same novel, the protagonists use {{spoiler|the antidote from the same territory as the poison}} to foil his plot. It goes so far as to have Bobby give the people of Ibara {{spoiler|weapons from Quillan to defeat an army of Quillan dado robots, who themselves were attacking Ibara on skimmers from Cloral}}.
* The trope is reversed in the ''[[Dragonlance]] Twins'' novels. Caramon bringing a volume detailing events back from [[After the End|a very dark future]] was the reason Krynn did not falter into an [[Alternate Continuity]] where it was utterly destroyed
* The ''[[1632]]'' series is about a small town from West Virginia sent back to the central Germany during the [[Thirty Years' War]], so almost every object in the town is a [[Timeline-Altering MacGuffin]]. A stupid king of England got his hands on history books and began executing people who would be responsible for the English Revolution years before it happened, thus earning some enemies years early and {{spoiler|causing some of his allies to join forces with Cromwell}}. Cardinal Richelieu got his hands on history books, realized a problem with his current policy that he hadn't noticed before, started an impressive [[Xanatos Gambit]], and [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|purchased America]]. And everyone is trying to reverse engineer 20th-century weapons. The storyline follows the altered timeline so it's impossible to say exactly how this will change things, but a safe guess would be "a lot".
** Of course the protagonists are [[Genre Savvy]] enough to realize what's going on, and go to great lengths to secure their remaining books. {{spoiler|One particularly nasty minor character who was selling history books to rival governments is told (in order to maintain his continued survival and freedom) to inform his customers that he will only sell copies because his supply is running low. The copies are loaded with deliberate misinformation. Thus the great Florida Gold Rush ensues...}}
* Done in Alfred Bester's ''Time and Third Avenue.'' A young lawyer accidentally gets a copy of the almanac from the far future year of 1985 and a timecop stops him before he opens it. The lawyer says all right, you can have the almanac: using it to speculate on stocks or bet on elections would be cheating, and I'm sure I can have a great career without cheating... only, I wish I could have some reassurance that the world won't end in a nuclear holocaust. So the timecop gives him a hundred dollar bill, one of the 1980 series. He can't spend it in his time, of course, but he feels that he's well paid {{spoiler|when he reads the name of the Secretary of the Treasury from the bill... and it's him.}}
Line 66:
*** What's more, they are absolutely and utterly immutable, such that they can change history, just by being read. In ''Oblivion'' the ultimate thieves guild quest involves stealing one in order to break a Daedric curse.
* Another non-time travel version is in ''[[Predator]]: Concrete Jungle''. The game starts in 1920s Chicago, where the Predator accidentally leaves some of his technology behind. Cut to modern-day, and the technology has become way advanced, with [[Hollywood Cyborg|Hollywood Cyborgs]] and [[I Want My Jetpack|flying cars and all that fun stuff.]]
* In ''[[SD Gundam G Generation]] DS'', the cast of ''[[Turn
== [[Western Animation]] ==
| |||