SCIENCE FICTION WRITER
ROBERT J. SAWYER
Best Novel Hugo and Nebula Award Winner

SFWRITER.COM >Novels > End of an Era > Outline for a TV Series

END OF AN ERA

A Science-Fiction TV Series

proposal by

Robert J. Sawyer

based on his award-winning novel

In 2000, I was asked to develop a TV-series proposal based on my novel End of an Era. Here's what I came up with.
SPOILER WARNING: Although I've made several changes to the storyline of the novel, I don't recommend you read this outline if you haven't read the original novel — doing so will spoil a lot of the surprises in that book for you.

HIGH CONCEPT FOR THE SERIES

The War of the Worlds meets The Time Machine.

PREMISE

The Huang Effect, a method for traveling back in time, is invented early in the 21st century. Although the military is initially fascinated by it, it soon becomes apparent that the technique is of little use to anyone except paleontologists.

The amount of energy required for time travel is inversely proportional to the length of time you wish to travel. To go back 104 million years, the maximum that the Huang Effect allows, requires virtually no energy at all. To go back 103 million years requires a little energy, 102 a little more, and so on. Any attempt to travel back into historical times, a thousand years or so, would take the entire energy output of the Earth for the better part of a century, and to venture back into the last few decades would require the harnessed power of a small nova.

Given these constraints, Earth's first time-travel mission sends six international scientists — three women and three men — back 65 million years, to the closing days of the Mesozoic Era, in order to solve once and for all the mystery of the death of the dinosaurs.

(True science: most paleontologists concede that a meteor did hit the Yucatán around the time the dinosaurs died out — within perhaps a hundred thousand years of the extinctions; that's as accurately as we can date the meteor impact. But the majority of real paleontologists today do not believe the meteor was the killing agent.)

When our multinational team arrives in the late Cretaceous, they soon discover that the dinosaurs are alive and well — and that the meteor-impact crater does indeed already exist; the big thump had come years before, but hadn't killed the dinosaurs. Whatever will soon kill off the dinosaurs, it has nothing to do with the meteor impact.

Our human explorers immediately notice that Earth's gravity is only about one-third of what it is in the present day; this has the effect of magnifying their physical powers, letting them jump higher than they ever could before and perform other feats of super-strength.

The constellations in the night sky are completely different from what our characters are used to seeing. There are also two unidentified points of light visible high in the sky, one green, the other blue, that even those members of the team trained in astronomy can't recognize.

The world is populated with dinosaurs and other incredible reptiles: fierce Tyrannosaurus rex; armored Triceratops; giant, flying Quetzalcoatlus. Our team makes the startling realization that the reduced gravity is what let the dinosaurs grow to be so much bigger than any of the animals that came later.

But it turns out that there are even more amazing creatures around than the dinosaurs. Earth at this time is being visited by Martians; Mars in the Mesozoic isn't the red, dusty, almost airless world we know today, but rather is covered with oceans and has a thick atmosphere — it is the blue point of light our heroes have seen in the night sky.

The Martians — or Hets, as they call themselves — are based on viruses, rather than on normal cells. Viruses are much, much smaller than cells, and this allows the Hets, which appear as gelatinous mounds, to percolate into the flesh of animals, taking them over. The Hets inhabit the bodies of Troödons — small, bipedal carnivorous dinosaurs, similar to the raptors of Jurassic Park fame. They use these dinosaurs, the most intelligent ones that ever lived, as their hands and legs — and mouths: the Hets are able to speak through them to our human characters.

What are the Martians doing on Earth? At first they seem to simply be explorers, but it soon becomes clear that much more is going on. They've used gravity-suppression satellites to lower Earth's gravity to match that of their home world, so that their gelatinous bodies won't be pinned to the ground here.

The Martians, we discover, are breeding dinosaurs to use as biological tanks in a war they are fighting with the natives of what, here in the past, is the fifth planet in our solar system: a planet that, by our time, has broken up to form the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Hets use only biotechnology, not metallurgy or other forms of manufacturing; even their space vessels are living beings. Percolating into the dinosaur tanks, the Hets can directly control the minds of their reptilian battle-creatures.

Earth is strategic in this war. It is the third planet out from our sun, Mars the fourth, and the world that will become the asteroid belt (a green planet the Hets call Kandax) the fifth. But when Earth and Kandax are on one side of the sun and Mars is on the other — a configuration that can last for an entire Earth year — our world is much closer to Kandax than Mars is. This makes it an ideal platform from which to launch attacks.

In our first episode, the timeship is severely damaged in an attack by Het-controlled tyrannosaurs, who have assumed this strange arrival is a Kandaxian vessel. Not only does the attack disable the timeship's ability to return to the future, it also destroys much of the food and water supplies that our travelers have brought from the 21st century. What should have been a reasonably comfortable expedition turns rapidly into a struggle just to survive. Although the Hets apologize for the attack, the reality is that our team may not be able to repair their timeship with the resources available on Earth in the Mesozoic; they might all be stranded there.

Still, who are the aggressors in this war? The Hets? Or the Kandaxians? Whom should our heroes align themselves with? And how will our people cope with the harsh, dynamic, exciting environment of Earth's distant and mysterious past?

Combining science-fiction icons — dinosaurs and aliens — and the popular themes of extraterrestrial invasion and time travel should make End of an Era hugely popular with SF fans and non-fans alike.

CHARACTERS

Brandon ("Brandy") Thackeray, white male. Leader of the expedition. A paleontologist specializing in ceratopsians (such as Triceratops). He's used to the relative civility of the academic world, and is completely unprepared for the challenges that are forced upon the team members in the raw prehistoric past; because of the damage to the timeship, it's as if they've all suddenly become contestants on Survivor without ever choosing that fate.

Miles ("Klicks") Jordan, black male. A paleontologist, specializing in tyrannosaurs. A strong professional rival of Brandy back in the 21st century. Klicks has been a proponent of the theory that a meteor impact killed off the dinosaurs. When it's discovered that that is not what happened, he realizes he will face professional humiliation and ruin when the team returns to the present. A bookish academic, he finds the superstrength he has under ancient Earth's one-third gravity intoxicating.

Ching-Mei Huang, Asian female. Physicist, co-inventor of the Huang Effect time-travel method. It falls to her to try to repair the damaged timeship; if she fails, our team will be stranded forever in the past. Over the course of the series, Brandy begins to suspect that perhaps Ching-Mei's research partner, David Cohen, who had died at the age of 37 back in the 21st century, was the real brains behind the time-travel discovery. Indeed, Brandy soon wonders whether Ching-Mei was responsible for her partner's death, so that she could claim unfair credit for the invention (notably now called just the Huang Effect, not the Cohen-Huang Effect). But if Brandy presents his evidence, Ching-Mei might not finish repairing the timeship so that she can avoid facing homicide charges back in the 21st century.

Tess Thackeray, white female. A paleontologist specializing in pterosaurs (flying reptiles). She is Brandy's wife, but early in the series they break up — they'd been having trouble living together in the 21st century, although they'd hid this from everyone involved in the project, but the stress of the Mesozoic proves too much. She becomes involved with Klicks Jordan; Brandy tries to win her back.

Peter Hamasaki, Asian male. The expedition's medical doctor. Deeply religious. When the questions our team has to deal with move beyond the paleontological, he challenges Brandy for leadership of the expedition. Brandy believes that they should use the timeship, once it is repaired, to bring not just dinosaurs but Martian Hets as well into the future, thereby bypassing their own extinction. Peter is firmly opposed to the humans playing God in this way.

Irina Petrova, white female. The team's geologist. She believes the timeship will never be repaired, and is more interested in forging an advantageous relationship with one or the other alien factions, making a new life here in the age of dinosaurs.

13-EPISODE ARC

Each episode will tell a self-contained science-fiction action-adventure story focusing on our diverse and fascinating cast of human characters and their encounters with aliens and dinosaurs. In addition, though, each episode will also reveal part of the overall story arc for the series.

Episode One: Arrival in the Mesozoic. Discovery of Earth's reduced gravity. First encounters with dinosaurs. First contact with the Hets.

Episode Two: Realization that the blue planet visible in the night sky is Mars; it is warm and alive in the Mesozoic. Realization that the Hets are from Mars. Problem: humans know that Mars will be laid waste in the future, becoming the dry, red world of our time. Should they tell the Martians that Het civilization is doomed?

Episode Three: Realization that the green planet is a world that existed at this time between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Discovery that the Hets are at war with the as-yet unseen natives of this planet.

Episode Four: Discovery of the meteor-impact crater; something else must eventually kill off the dinosaurs.

Episode Five: Hets learn that Mars is, in fact, dead, in the 21st century — but they realize that they can bypass their own extinction by traveling forward in time with the humans when they return to the future. Much pressure on the humans to do precisely this.

Episode Six: Discovery that the Hets can take over humans just as they've taken over dinosaurs. Problem: have members of the human team been taken over? Who can be trusted?

Episode Seven: We meet the Kandaxians, who tell a much different story about the war than the Hets have.

Episode Eight: Dr. Hamasaki discovers that the viral Hets are in fact the ancestors of most of the viruses that plague Earth in the 21st century, including those that cause influenza, AIDS, polio, many forms of cancer, and more. It seems the Hets did not go completely extinct when Mars dried up, but rather they lingered on in dangerous forms.

Episode Nine: The current Het civilization is one of many that have risen and fallen over a period of a hundred million years; the gravity-suppression satellites were the product of a much earlier Het society.

Episode Ten: We discover which members of the human expedition have been taken over by Hets.

Episode Eleven: The method for controlling the gravity- suppression satellites is revealed.

Episode Twelve: The Hets are driven to conquer by their viral nature (true science: viruses are only alive when they take over other lifeforms). They are the aggressors in the interplanetary war, and will doubtless take over all six billion human beings if they are brought forward in time.

Episode Last (obviously, there could be more intervening episodes if a 26-episode or longer series is to be produced): In our series finale, we will end with a bang — the shutting off of the gravity-suppressing satellites (killing off the dinosaurs, who are unable to withstand triple the weight they are used to) and the destruction of the fifth planet, blowing it up into the millions of fragments we now know as the asteroids.

THE SOURCE NOVEL

Robert J. Sawyer's novel End of an Era was one of the most successful science-fiction books of 1994. The novel:

won the Seiun Award (Japan's top honor in science fiction) for the Best Foreign Novel of the Year;
won the CompuServe Science Fiction and Fantasy Forum's Homer Award for Best Novel of the Year;
was named one of the best SF novels of the last TEN years by the critics for both Quill & Quire (Canada's publishing trade magazine) and The Edmonton Journal;
will be re-issued in a new edition by Tor Books, New York, the world's largest publisher of science fiction, in the fall of 2001.

THE AUTHOR

Robert J. Sawyer — "just about the best science-fiction writer out there these days," according to the Denver Rocky Mountain News — won the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's Nebula Award for Best Novel of the Year (for The Terminal Experiment). His twelfth novel, Calculating God, was a national mainstream bestseller in Canada and is first on Borders' list of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2000. For more information, see his extensive web site at www.sfwriter.com.

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SCIENCE FICTION WRITER ROBERT J. SAWYER Best Novel Hugo and Nebula Award Winner