In Friday's installment of his ongoing examination of Left Behind: The Movie, Fred Clark points out some gaps in the movie-Antichrist's plan, where it departs from the loopy prophetic cosmology of the Left Behind books. He then notes how they could've done better:
If Team Nicolae had really done their homework, they'd have consulted with groups like the Canaan Land Restoration of Israel, Inc., to make sure they had all their ducks in a row before trying to launch their apocalypse. The frustrating thing for Nicolae at this point has to be that it's already too late for him to get in touch with these folks. Once all the real Bible prophecy experts have been raptured he's stuck relying on people like Stonagal and, as the glaring omission of a red cow demonstrates, such people just aren't reliable.
What Nicky really should have done was to conscript people like Bruce Barnes or, for that matter, Gershom Gorenberg -- people who have some expertise in the details of PMD prophecy check lists but who, for one reason or another, wound up among those left behind. That might've made for an interesting story, too, a complicated game of mental chess in which these imprisoned experts in their library dungeon tried to sabotage the Antichrist's plans by giving him oracular misinformation. "The prophecies are very clear," Bruce could say to Nicolae. "You must start a land war in Asia and invade Magog this winter."
Actually, I think it might be even more interesting to have them consulting with PMD prophecy experts who weren't "left behind." They could leave a series of instructional DVD's, or set up a web site that would periodically serve up videos letting the Antichrist know what to do at critical junctures. Sort of like the "Seldon crisis" videos in Foundation.
After all, these "prophecy experts" have supposedly used their magic decoder rings to discover exactly what will happen, according to the Bible. And the temporary success of the Antichrist is as essential for the ultimate victory of God as the temporary success of the messianic Jews that PMD organizations cynically back in hopes that they'll rebuild the Temple.
So, really, giving the Antichrist prophetic guidelines would be doing God's work. You wouldn't want him to forget a critical detail like a red cow, and derail the whole apocalypse.
Somebody could probably make a decent book out of this, or at least an amusing novella.
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Not only more interesting but more effective as well. Because you know a would-be Antichrist like Nicolae would recognize "start[ing] a land war in Asia" as a classic colossal blunder.
Speaking of movies (and books) where a major plot point is that There Is A Prophecy That Must Be Fulfilled: I've been thinking that it would be amusing if more books and movies had prophecies that, at the end of it all, *turned out to be wrong!* For example, we could have a series of would-be Heros trying to overthrow the Evil Overlord by fulfilling the prophecy, and all fail because, hey, the Overlord knows the prophecy too. Then, the final attempt is by a guy who says "You know what? Screw the prophecy. I'm just going to wing it!" and he succeeds.
The very end could be to have somebody who'd been championing the Prophecy all along, launch into an obviously-ludicrous reinterpretation of the Prophecy to try and twist it to cover the events that *actually* happened. Maybe while the final Hero laughs his head off, and the defeated Overlord curses him as a fool.
Tim@2:
The video game Arcanum has a Grand Prophecy that turns out to be explicitly false.
You wouldn't want him to forget a critical detail like a red cow, and derail the whole apocalypse.
It's the end of the end of the world as we know it, and I feel disappointed.
The Annual Conference of Soothsayers and Prophets has been canceled due to unexpectedly bad weather.
Isaac Asimov, seriously, thought along similar lines. Remember that he couldn't decide, until far along in college, whether he wanted to major in Chemistry or in History.
The Foundation novels were his opening up and expansion and homage to Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Asimov wanted to play out a competition in the plane of ideas between "historical inevitability" as claimed by, for instance, Whigs and Marx, versus the "great man" theory. That is, do leaders simply get up in front of already advancing crowds, or do their decisions inherently determine what the crowds do?
The Foundation novels gave us an imaginary mathematical science, Psychohistory, which was akin to a Kinetic Theory of Gases where people are the molecules or, more subtly, about cooperative quantum effects, i.e. society as a Bose-Einsten Condensate. Either way, he postulated that one needed a galaxy-full of people for these emergent phenomena to dominate.
"The Mule" was a mutant Napoleon/Hitler/Caesar figure, the mutation being presumably due to a chance event at the molecular level such as a cosmic ray. It was he who threw off the prophecies so dramatically. Asimov did a good job of letting us feel the emotions of people who heard the post-Mule prophecies and understood how the real world had diverged from the psychohistorical extrapolations.
Near the end of his life, Asimov wrote a short story that shattered the very foundations of Foundation, suggesting that he'd come to consider that History might be genuinely Chaotic, in the strict scientific sense.
Harry Turtledove's oeuvre is at the same level of brilliance, because Harry had the Caltech science education AND the PhD in Byzantine History. His Alternate History novels, sometimes just fun, sometimes tragic, are always, beneath the viivid characters and intricate plots, meditations on the metaphysics of History.
The only other novel series that I know which takes prophecy so seriously or scientifically is Dune. I think that critics have subsequently been unkind to Kevin J. Anderson, the American science-fiction author, who has collaborated with Frank Herbert's son Brian Herbert as co-author on several Dune novels. Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert did a creditable job, in my opinion, of completing the grand historical arc of the Dune novels, and the issue of prophecy -- even for one who can genuinely see the future -- is explored with some depth.
As Muad'Dib had said, in a Frank Herbert original series novel (I'm doing this off the top of my head, so apologies if it's mere paraphrase): "The issue became Prophecy Management."
I didn't like Foundations very much, and frankly, that psychohistory thingy was pushing my suspension of disbelief.
On reflection, I really should've titled this "Foundation and Antichrist"...
Speaking of movies (and books) where a major plot point is that There Is A Prophecy That Must Be Fulfilled: I've been thinking that it would be amusing if more books and movies had prophecies that, at the end of it all, *turned out to be wrong!*
One of Tad Williams's epic trilogies does something along those lines. It's a spoiler, though, so I won't go into more detail.
I know the Tad Williams trilogy of which you speak and, yeah, when it got to the critical juncture his twist to the prophecies caught me completely off guard. It was really, really refreshing to see the heroes succeed in spite of fulfilling the prophecy instead of due to it.
On reflection, I really should've titled this "Foundation and Antichrist"...
THAT would have been awesome. And about 30 of your readers would have gotten it.
In fairness to Asimov and psychohistory, he did allow for totally unpredictable events that screwed up the Master Plan, i.e., the rise of the Mule. Asimov just stacked the deck somewhat with his Second Foundation that steered history back on track. With enough effort, you could make any prediction come true.
Then, the final attempt is by a guy who says "You know what? Screw the prophecy. I'm just going to wing it!" and he succeeds.
Wasn't that Harry Potter? :-)
As far as Foundation goes, I thought the whole principle behind psychohistory very interesting...although in a galaxy full of people, you'd wonder if the inability to have an entirely uniform culture would mess up the theory. But still, it was a cool idea. It just started getting kind of weird at the end of the series. Still, I'm sure it's a better read than the Left Behind series.