Prophecies

As I mentioned in my first blog post, there are certain clichés I wanted to avoid in my 'Temporal Affairs' series. Here are thoughts on some of these, in what I expect to be continuing series:

Prophecies: I can understand why writers (especially in the Fantasy genre) use this one. It lends a sense of destiny and importance to the character it pertains to, giving the sense that the entire universe is structured to make a certain event happen. The drawback is, if you've named a character as a "chosen one" who is going to conquer evil and bring happy days here once again, you've taken suspense out of the story somewhat, unless you find a clever way for the prophecy to play out in a way that is literally true, but not in a way that was expected. Nitpickers might point out that I have Tony Marco experience prophetic dreams or visions at various points in 'The Foster Children of Time.' I could say that I used this device for foreshadowing purposes and explained it in the context of my rules of time travel (which is true). But, after all 'The Foster Children of Time' is supposed to be an homage to classic fantasy (from a sci-fi perspective), so I didn't entirely shy from using some of the tropes of the genre.