why i love time in a bottle -- a sort of review thingy

[lobelia321]

I just re-read astolat's SGA fic Time in a Bottle which is one of the most beautiful stories I know, of fanfic and origfic both. So I wrote a sort of review or rather account of what I love about it.

I just re-read Time in a Bottle (for, what, the seventh, eighth time? I'll be able to chant it in my sleep soon) and am again overwhelmed by the loveliness of it. Someone somewhere said it reminded them of divorce in reverse, which I found interesting, but I read it differently.

To me, it is a wonderful story of how two people are brought together by adversity. That sounds trite when I write it but I actually find the story really profound. I have never been so convinced of two people's incompatibility as I was in the first four pages of Time in a Bottle. (I print out all fic so this story has pages for me, *g*.) Or no, I shouldn't say incompatibility, but deep indifference. I think it is possibly the single most convincing indifference beginning that I have read in fandom. Often, in fics, the guys will seem indifferent but deep down, they're angsting or longing or conflicting or whatever until something happens and they discover what they subconsciously knew all along.

But Bottle!Rodney and John do not 'discover' that they love each other. They truly do not feel it and later they truly experience the process of falling in love and lust. I just think that process is so impossibly lovely and fragile.

I love, adore with a hundred passions, the Bottle-world astolat(Shalott) made for them. I was very sorry when they emerged from the Bottle world on page 14. I love all the passages where they interact with the Bottle world, alone or together. And I love the way Shalott structured the whole process; I must go back and re-read (for the eleventieth time?) to figure out how she stacked up the building blocks to lead them (and us readers) so imperceptibly to, um, climax (ack, pun alarm but it is in this story, in all senses of the word!!).

Because I am convinced of their indifference to each other at the beginning (they are colleagues, they are workmates, they are friendly enough but hey), but I am equally convinced of their deep need for each other by the end. They find this need because they are thrown together in extremis. I know that this can be a cheap way of getting two guys to cop off with each other, it's the Aliens-made-me-do-it scenario -- and don't get me wrong, I *love* that scenario, I just don't think Time in a Bottle is that story. I think Time in a Bottle goes beyond the extreme situation of these two guys to talk about extreme situations in general, and about the need of humans for each other. This is why it's not about two people 'discovering' their already-stored-up lust for each other but about two people discovering that you need people, anybody, and here it just happens to be this particular person.

I suppose I am saying that in some sense the characters are interchangeable. This story could be just as convincing with any other pairing. Anybody in a situation such as this would need to fall back on the other person in order to survive.

And in some sense perhaps love itself is interchangeable. We fall in love with people because we are thrown together with them. There is no reason why we don't love someone else out of the billions on this planet but we can only love those in our vicinity. In that sense, Time in a Bottle is an almost existential, philosophical and deeply human story.

I hope I am making sense about the interchangeability which is, at the same time, an acknowledgement of the uniqueness of each person. Because that is also what is so lovely about this story, the way these two let each other be.

Oh, and it's phenomenally hot. Some passages make my skin hairs stand up and my lips swell. Other passages make me feel despair, especially John crawling along the ocean floor (another existential metaphor for existential horror and loss).


The fic is also on her LJ here.

Comments

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

i'd like to link this but am a bit hesitant after what happened last time. you're up for it or would rather pass???

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

*laughs*

I already posted a comment in cesperanzas LJ, asking her if I could link this to sga_noticeboard (their userinfo says 'recs' but not 'reviews'). So seeing I was going to link it myself, do link!

But thanks so much for asking, that is really kind of you, I appreciate it. I do feel a bit foolish now. :-)

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

Why foolish? :-)

seriously, I felt bad about the last time I linked you, so I'd rather be careful and make sure you're OK with it.