The past is either mutable or it is fixed. If you are writing a story about time travel, whether you pick mutable or fixed, you’re going to have to deal with disquieting consequences.
If history is immutable, you cannot fix the horrors of the past, but it is also the case that you cannot make your now worse. The timeline from which you started will stay the same. If you can tweak history, perhaps calamities can be prevented: the Challenger could be saved, the Titanic diverted, any number of terrible calamities prevented by the most trifling intervention. But if you step on the wrong butterfly, the world from which you started could be erased…
Immutable? Mutable? The authors of the following five works explored both…
“The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” by Alfred Bester (1958)
Discovering his wife in the arms of another man, scientist Henry Hassel is understandably vexed. Rather than settle for angrily lashing out at his unfaithful wife and her paramour, the brilliant physicist uses a time machine to travel back in time to murder his wife’s grandfather before his wife’s father is born. His wife is thus erased from having ever existed.
Imagine Hassel’s surprise when he returns to his home in time to discover that his wife has not vanished in a puff of logic as expected, but remains in the arms of her lover. Nothing for it but further pursue temporal vendetta by causing even greater alterations to the time stream. Vengeance will not be his. An all too late education in the nature of time ensues.
One might expect a scientist whose first foray into temporal engineering produced results wildly at odds from those predicted by his model would pause to reassess said model. In his defense, the professor was very upset.
Operation Time Search by Andre Norton (1967)
Hargreaves and Fordham hope to solve 1980’s resource shortages by plundering the Earth’s distant past. Inadvertently dispatching Ray Osborn backwards through time was not on the menu. Nevertheless, the astonished photographer is catapulted to a time when the land was covered in vast, ancient forests unknown in modern day Ohio. Osborn scarcely has time to take in his new surroundings when he is taken prisoner by Atlanteans.
The long struggle between malevolent Atlantis and virtuous Mu is nearing its end. Atlantis expects total victory. History suggests that catastrophe is more likely. Two continents will be annihilated so completely that their very existence is open to debate. Osborn thus has a choice: play passive witness to history and perish with Atlantis and Mu, or intervene to save both…with who knows what consequences for 1980?
It seems to me that extracting resources in the past will only exacerbate resource shortages in the present. I’d have more faith that the scientists know what they are doing, save for that potentially-altering-the-time-stream-by-accident thing.
Timescape by Gregory Benford (1980)
Among the wonders provided by the advance of technology are irreversible changes to ocean chemistry. Ocean food chain disruption is only the beginning. Humanity, lacking any means to halt the process once it’s been set in motion, may be doomed. Happily, John Renfrew may be able to save the present by altering the past.
Renfrew and his colleagues can send tachyons across space and into the past in order to warn past Earth and so prevent disaster. Renfrew is aware the desperate gambit faces serious impediments, not least its dependence on a scientist of the past having the necessary insight to detect tachyons and recognize them as a signal. In fact, due to an unforeseen characteristic of space-time, the plan will both succeed magnificently and fail abjectly.
This novel would have served as an excellent example for this venerable essay, as Benford’s July 1980 novel about forestalling global calamity by sending messages to the past was preceded by James P. Hogan’s March 1980 Thrice Upon a Time, which also focuses on forestalling global calamity using messages to the past. The two novels are distinguished by entirely different models of time, as well as by their prose. Which novel was better? The Benford won a BSFA for Best Novel, a Campbell Memorial Award, a Ditmar, and a Nebula whereas the Hogan … didn’t.
A Tale of Time City by Diana Wynne Jones (1987)
Time City has prospered thanks to its control of history… until now. Now Time City is threatened by accelerating entropy. Time City’s Sempitern (basically a mayor, more or less) and the Time Council are at a loss. The Sempitern’s young son Jonathan, on the other hand, is convinced he has a simple solution.
Jonathan has the name of the person blamed for Time City’s problems: Vivian Smith. All Jonathan needs to do is snatch the miscreant out of the time stream. What could go wrong with a such a simple plan? Aside from the minor matter that many people are named Vivian Smith and Jonathan has abducted the wrong Vivian Smith. Jonathan’s quest to save Time City now depends on the perspicacity of eleven-year-old war refugee Vivian Smith.
This novel could be read as a YA reply to Asimov’s The End of Eternity. One significant difference is that the protagonists are kids and not jaded adults. Another is, as with so many Jones novels, the adults in this book are not the sharpest or most useful crayons in the box.
The Girl From Everywhere by Heidi Heilig (2016)
Nix’s father Slate, struggling with a growing opium addiction, has been content to use his ability to Navigate his ship Temptation through time to satisfy immediate needs and desires. No grand architect of history, Slate is happy to take history as it is, save for one tragedy. If Slate could only find a map that would him back before his beloved wife’s death in 1868, he would save her regardless of the consequences.
When the means to reach 1868 appears within Slate’s grasp, Nix is forced to consider the potential consequences. A sufficiently dramatic historical change prior to Nix’s birth could erase Nix entirely. Lacking her father’s Navigation skill, it is unclear what Nix can do. Regardless, Nix must act or perish in the Winds of Change.
Caper fans may be interested to know a good chunk of the book involves a historical caper, the 1884 looting of the Hawaiian treasury.
It is a credit to Nix that she never considers the most obvious way to forestall her father’s plan, which is to jam a sharp marlinspike deep in her father’s head before disposing of his weighted corpse into the abyssal depths. No time traveler, no time traveler-related problems…
***
Unexpected consequences due to dabbling in the past afford such rich plot possibilities that for every work I did mention, there are no doubt hundreds that I did not. Some of your favorites may have been omitted or erased from history thanks to some time-traveling fool. If so, feel free to mention them in the comments below.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021, 2022, and 2023 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
Just going to get it over with and note Star Trek‘s ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ as my absolute favourite of this genre.
And as long as I’m at it, there’s also ‘Tomorrow is Yesterday’ and ‘Assignment: Earth’, which are also fun, but don’t include Joan Collins.
Time permitting (ha!) I may consider other works, but I’m sure there will be no shortage of submissions from others.
You seem to have mistakenly implied that the adults in Asimov novels are the sharpest and most useful crayons in the box. At least, I assume that was a mistake.
Very well written
A subset of the ‘you can’t change the past’ type of time travel story is one in which attempts to keep a past event from happening end up being the very things that ensure that that thing happens. The original Terminator movie was an example of this: if Skynet hadn’t sent the Terminator back to prevent John Connor’s birth, then he would never have been conceived.
It always kind of bothers me when a story tries to play it both ways: interfering with the past just ensures that things play out the way they were destined to, unless, for ill-defined reasons, they don’t. So in Terminator 2, Skynet brings about its own existence by sending technology back in time, pointing to the inevitability of fate; but also people are able to stop the cycle, indicating that you can stop the cycle of fate due to … free will or something? I’m not saying that these can’t be reconciled — I think maybe later movies tried to — but it seemed pretty sloppy to me.
Stephen King’s 11/22/63 is a great example of time travellers trying to correct what they perceive as an historical injustice, only for things to go just a little sideways, along several axes. And an oddity for Boomer authors as well, in a way that stating might be vaguely spoiler-ish. The TV series wasn’t bad either.
It was clear even in the first Terminator movie that Skynet thought changing the past was possible. Whether or not that was correct wasn’t really worth discussing; Skynet had both the theory and the time machine, and the humans didn’t.
The impression I got from the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is that the past was mutable, within limits. Details could change but the changes were never so dramatic as to prevent Skynet from inventing time travel and creating John Connor.
Similarly in the films, Miles Dyson could die but that just meant someone else created Skynet a bit later.
Someone’s got to mention Ray Bradbury”s “A Sound of Thunder”, so there we are, it’s been mentioned.
Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency involves some time-travel shenanigans – one character has to be the person from Porlock who interrupted Coleridge while he was writing “Xanadu”. By some temporal alchemy, we get the music of J.S. Bach as compensation for losing Coleridge’s masterpiece. Don’t ask me how it works, just go back in time and ask Douglas Adams.
Doctor Who, as far as it’s consistent at all, seems to regard time as robust but not completely inflexible; some of the stories invold the Doctor and his pals intervening to keep history on track. The relaunched series, during David Tennant’s (first) tenure in the role, introduced the notion of “fixed points in time” where the Doctor could not meddle, while outside these he had much more freedom of action. No, I don’t know how this is supposed to work either. Let’s face it, I’m rubbish at temporal mechanics.
Poul Anderson’s Delenda Est, one of his Time Patrol stories. It was published in F&SF in 1955, but I didn’t read it until the 1960 Ballantine linked collection Guardians of Time. I believe that it was my first encounter with the idea.
Poul Anderson’s “Wildcat” (F&SF, November 1958, 9 years prior to Norton’s Operation Time Search) also involves going back in time to solve resources shortages, in this case by drilling for oil in the Jurassic and pumping it back to the future.
(Anderson includes a line noting that most scientists think oil comes from “rotting dinosaurs” but in this world Fred Hoyle was right with his theory (of which I’ve never heard) that oil was present in space and so became part of the planets as they formed. Anderson also postulates T. Rex being present during the Jurassic, so …)
To be fair to the story, the batshit idea that pumping oil to the future would solve their problems isn’t really what the story turns out to be about — the surprise ending offers an entirely different solution to the problems of the future, suggesting that while time travel might not work the way they sell it as working, it MIGHT save the human race, sort of …)
@Steve Wright (8): The Doctor himself acknowledged that time is more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly time-y wimey stuff.
Larry Niven offers a few takes on this theme – “Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation” and “Wrong Way Street” come to mind.
Time and Again by Jack Finney – Time travel to 1882 by way of hypnosis where avoiding unintended consequences is a big part of the plot, no spoilers
What was the story where the past was so immutable that the time traveler was simply shouldered aside like a ghost, and then raindrops went through him like bullets?
The recent series The Lazarus Project concerns a secret organization, custodians of a gizmo that can reset the entire universe to the previous first of July; those who have received the special serum keep their memories of the unrolled stack frames. They use this to undo mass destructive events like the World War IIIs that keep popping up.
Sometimes it takes their field agents many, many tries to get the world successfully to its next July.
And it turns out all of this is very bad for their social lives and mental well-being.
What, no honourable mention for R A Lafferty’s Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne? Or Brooklyn Project by William Tenn? For shame!
(Ed: and Anthony Boucher’s The Other Inauguration proves that though Time may not be immutable politics is…)
@14 The title of the Coleridge poem is “Kubla Khan”. TBH I am unsure how much better it could be…
@14: The Man Who Lived Backwards by Charles F. Fall (as discussed here https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/195076/what-story-does-c-s-lewis-acknowledge-in-the-preface-to-the-great-divorce)
Then there’s Wikihistory, which is lovely (and on line) – a bulletin board for time travellers with a member who insists on making changes, with unfortunate results.
https://www.tor.com/2011/08/31/wikihistory/
Tim Powers Anubis Gates.
Michael Moorcock Dancers at the End of Time
Another good story by Poul Anderson that fits this description is his “The Sorrow of Odin the Goth” one of his Time Patrol stories. A researcher who travels back to the era of the ancient Goths to investigate the origins of certain Northern myths is shocked to discover that he is the inspiration behind them. Tragically he finally has to intervene to keep the course of history on its ordained track.
I think Connie Willis did it best in To Say Nothing of the Dog. Come on, the Bishop’s bird stump is brilliant!
Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Sea of Tranquility is about time travel, as handled by a mostly-secret organization that is supposed to observe the past but not make changes, and that (as far as it knows, at least) has the only time machines in existence.
Back in the 1980s, DC Comics’ Crisis on Infinite Earths took away Roy Thomas’ use of characters such as Superman, Wonder Woman and Aquaman from being in the Justice Society of America back in the 40s (one earth, one version of all the characters, which became modern day). Thomas felt that nature would abhor a vacuum, and therefore created analogs of those characters in the form of Iron Munro, Fury and Neptune Perkins to replace what had been lost.
Saw a relevant comic strip recently —
Panel 1: Man completes a time machine.
Panel 2: Goes into the past to kill Hitler as a child.
Panel 3: Is arrested on his return as the first time-travel murderer, for killing an innocent child (after all, nobody remembers what Hitler used to have grown up and done…)
Since film and television are being discussed, recall that Babylon 5 managed to pull off time travel not only across epochs of in-universe history but even across seasons (including cast changes that occurred after the first episode aired).
Whenever this subject is discussed I always recommend Time Travelers Never Die by Jack McDevitt. Your mileage on some plot detours and the ending, but to me it is the definitive book that embraces how time travel must necessarily mean nonlinear thinking, a very hard concept to consider in any circumstance, and actively explores uses of the technology beyond a specific plot reason. Worth it for this conversation alone:
@25: Better ending panel would be, arrested by time police for allowing Joseph Goebbels or Heinrich Himmler to lead the Nazis in even worse atrocities and potential military successes. Somehow, whenever the “Kill Hilter” stories are done, no one recalls that there were other powerful people doing things in the Third Reich.
The fix-up novel Times Without Number by John Brunner is actually one of Brunner’s better efforts. It’s one of those time manipulation stories where the end result is history as we know it, rather than the much different alternative at the start of the book. Somewhat the reverse of the more common result in these stories.
Another Story /a fisherman of the Inland Sea, by UK LeGuin. Most of the stories in that novel concern transilience, her term for time travel – but the last, longer story of the novel really worked in/on my mind.
“I honor your intent” became a commonly used phrase for me, after reading it.
At the beginning of the fourth season of Eureka, several characters inadvertently travel back in time to the town’s founding in 1947 and have to find a way back to the present. They eventually do, but find the timeline has been altered in significant ways, which remained until the show’s end. It was a nice way of keeping the show fresh.
@27 – Stephen Fry’s novel Making History was about something like that – Hitler was never born, thanks to the use of a time machine that delivered a permanent male contraceptive to the well that supplied Hitler’s parent’s water, but a more ruthless and intelligent ex-soldier became the leader of the nascent Nazi Party and steered it to the sort of successes that Hitler only dreamed of. At the time of the story, the Third Reich and the US have been locked into a cold war since the 1940s.
Natasha Pulley’s The Kingdoms has a nice twist on time travel, and is a great read besides. An English ship from 1898 accidentally travels back to just before the Napoleonic wars, and is captured by the French.
I really liked Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, by Kelly Robson. Things don’t go as planned. It’s not the time travel story you might have expected. But you get to see Earth a couple of centuries in the future, recovering from environmental disasters. You get to see Mesopotamia around 2000 BCE when it was still a lush garden, and when it was the most powerful and sophisticated civilization on Earth. And you get to see it with some memorable characters.
@28) Times Without Number is wonderful, I think it’s Brunner’s best from his “early” period, by far. And it’s a great example for this thread.
@29) I too love “Another Story; or, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea”. (Though I confess I don’t think of time travel first when I think of the story …)
Timeline by Michael Crichton was quite good. There were a number of interesting ideas. One stepped close to something I ran across in a sociology course I took in college. Suggested that even just the act of observing can create change that might not have occurred otherwise. Have to wonder about the effect of all those hours of observation on the Chimpanzees of Gombe by Ms. Goodall over the years…
There’s also Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates, where English professor Brendan Doyle, having been sent back in time, becomes the poet William Ashbless (a contemporary of Coleridge) that he has been professionally interested in.
(Ashbless being a fictional character invented by Powers and James Blaylock when they were students at Cal State, Fullerton, which both have used in their fiction.)
The Time’s Tapestry quartet by Stephen Baxter is interesting. Starting with the building of Hadrian’s Wall and and with the Second World war it tells stories that show that someone, maybe more than one, is constantly trying to alter history. It’s not that easy.
I want to defend _Thrice Upon a Time_ – it might not have been award-worthy, but it was a pretty well-crafted set of time loops.
Of course, that impression might just be because I haven’t reread it in 40 years or so :)
While not strictly time travel, the 1974 novel “The Forever War” by Joe Haldeman plays with relativity so brilliantly it twists your mind up in knots. Highly recommend.
Also, you can’t not mention Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder”. smh
Michael Moorcock Behold the Man.
I’m enjoying Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s “Before the Coffee Gets Cold” series, about time travel (with some very constraining rules) in a cafe in Japan. You need to drift over to the “Fiction” section, though; this is almost definitely not shelved in “Science Fiction”.
No one mentioned John Crowley’s novella “Great Work of Time”, so I’ll give a vote as a worthy entry in the sub-genre. Time proves to be mutable, but must be made immutable.
The squickiest time travel plot that never got developed was Gene Roddenberry’s 1970s proposal for Kirk and Spock to take another bite of the time-travel apple and ensure JFK’s assassination… Something about a Klingon plot to interfere in Earth’s development by saving Kennedy that required Spock to salvage history by being the gunman.
You can see echoes of the idea in the recent Star Trek: Strange New Worlds time-travel episode “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.”
A lot of his stuff has not aged well, but I still think the best time travel story I’ve ever read is “‘– All You Zombies –‘” by Robert Heinlein.
See also “Profile in Silver,” an episode in the 1980’s Twilight Zone revival series, scripted by J. Neil Schulman. In it, a 22nd-century descendant of John F. Kennedy goes back in time to film the assassination. Overcome by emotion, he ends up causing the bullets to miss. Shortly afterward, it becomes apparent that doing so has so disrupted the fabric of space-time, that the reaction triggers a crisis that could lead to nuclear war, so he needs to go back and allow the event to occur.
@45: Starring Andrew Robinson (DS9’s Garak)!
“MUgwump 4” by Robert Silverberg definitely takes a stand on whether the past is immutable or not.
I originally read it in a library book as a kid, a collection of humorous SF stories titled _Cosmic Laughter_. It was pretty funny, but as a kid I found the very end of the story to be nightmarishly horrifying.
I don’t know if it legally should be, but an online copy of the story is extremely easy to find. I just reread it.
Dammit, the Internet claims “MUgwump 4” was not in _Cosmic Laughter_. I don’t know what anthology I found it in. Sorry.
As best I recall, Fred Hoyle’s October the First Is Too Late posits that time is like layers of geological strata, and that what we perceive as time passing is merely our consciousnesses traversing through them. And sometimes something happens to shake them up.
“the brilliant physicist uses a time machine to travel back in time to murder his wife’s grandfather”
Or possibly the husband of her grandmother?
I guess the 1632 series by Eric Flint and others can’t count because the time travel was involuntary, but the books are great fun.
Nor does Lest Darkness Fall by L Sprague de Camp.
But the Chronicles of St. Mary’s are wacky fun too, in a very phlegmatic British way. There are 14 of them so far.
@17: Coleridge claimed that he had a much longer work in mind before he was interrupted, not that what we have would have been better.
In Chandler’s Kelly Country, somebody from the 1980’s thinks he’s just observing Ned Kelly’s unsuccessful guerilla actions — but his being there provides enough distractions/information that Kelly wins. (Don’t ask me how, I haven’t reread in ~40 years; all I remember is that there’s an unpowered-but-dirigible airship that the author claimed was analogous to one in our timeline.)
@0: Henry Hassel was lucky; he just became less real. The spoiled idiot (he doesn’t rise to the level of a villain) in de Camp’s “A Gun for Dinosaur” tries to alter the past and is snapped back to the present, at a speed that reduces him to a pulp.
@27: the question is whether the others would have gotten anywhere without a ~charismatic to front for them; Elleander Morning argues they wouldn’t, or would at least have lived ordinary lives.
@28: the Brunner is one of my favorites for its logic: if tweaking the past can alter everything downtime from the tweak, some induhvidual somewhere is going to make the wrong tweak such that time travel isn’t invented. Sometimes entropy isn’t a bad thing….
There’s a parody/homage to the Bester called “The Men who Corflued Mohammed ” by the way (by Mike Glyer).
David Gerrold’s “The Man Who Folded Himself” — a unique take on non-paradox time travel. One of the first SF books I remember checking out from the library in the late seventies/early eighties.
Amazing that no one has mentioned Joe Haldeman’s The Hemingway Hoax, a novella about Hemingway’s lost manuscript which he lost on a train in reality, but in this story it’s pilfered by the time traveller narrator, and hilarious complications ensue. A delightful work by one of our all time masters of the sf world.
As for dramatic works, The Umbrella Academy on Netflix is a wonderful series with a tremendous time travel aspect. I can’t recommend it highly enough to do it justice!
The door into summer by Heinlein. Man travels back to change his present and sees himself through a window. 50’s or 60’s definitely early enough it probably gave readers a real brain melt.
Kage Baker’s Company series.
I looked through this thread, and nowhere found reference to Friz Leiber’s stories- Try and Change the Past! Shocked!!
That includes the Galaxy Magazine 2-part serial The Big Time which I read as part of Ace double along with the various short stories about Try and Change the Past.
Similar to John Brunner’s novel, an earlier example is Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee circa 1954.
Of course, someone must mention Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps”, where the immutability of history is handled by very twisty time loops.
Randall Garrett’s “Frost and Thunder” comes to mind, where an accidental time traveler gets caught up in — and/or helps generate — the story of Thor.
Dean McLaughlin’s “Hawk Among the Sparrows” was a good one, where a modern fighter pilot gets translated back to World War One and becomes involved with an air squadron that is being hassled by a Red Baron analogue. The pilot has all his highly advanced weaponry — but will it succeed against a Sopwith Camel (or equivalent)?
Re: conserving the past
In “Exercise in Speculation: The Theory and Practice of Time Travel”, Larry Niven wrote (on the concept of “The Law of Conservation of Events”): “If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe.”
How about another of Heinlein’s bites from the time travel apple – By his Bootstraps
The Big Time, by Fritz Leiber (time wars, goes off singing “I don’t like Spiders and Snakes”).
Jodi Taylor’s St. Mary’s series, which begins to veer into Time Wars several volumes in.
Bearing an Hourglass, Piers Anthony, which I finally just gave up on keeping track and simply enjoyed the ride.
This seems like the forum. Does anyone else recall a time travel book that was a competition between the English and the Spanish? I remember the copnquistador time traveler, and the idea that time travel was very simple using silver (not that our time stream ever learned it). I remember enjoying it, but cannot remember the book!
I’m excited about the time travel titles I’m finding here!
@63 – I believe that you’re thinking of John Brunner’s Times Without Number.
@8 @17
I gets more complicated in Butler’s “the men who mastered time” where Coleridge’s Xanadu is used as evidence of time travel.
****
I was once told of another story, but I cannot remember the author or title, where time tour guide brings tourists to major events, like the crucification of Jesus. Unfortunately this time, he looses track if one of his tourists, and decides to travel back in order to catch but fails, and he needs to go back even further….. All this culminating in a ever growing crowd of time travellers for what originally was a very solitary event.
Archer’s Goon by Dianna Wynne Jones. If it looks familiar, I just mentioned in the strange gods thread. It’s a deeply weird novel.
@65) Could that be “Let’s Go to Golgotha”, by Garry Kilworth?
Also perhaps vaguely similar to John Kessel’s excellent screwball comedy Corrupting Dr. Nice, which at least deserves a mention in this thread.
All this culminating in a ever growing crowd of time travellers for what originally was a very solitary event.
The phrase “ever-growing crowd of time travellers” reminds me of a story about the man who invents a time machine powered by an iridium core, and decides to go back to see what wiped out the dinosaurs. Obvious, his friend says, we know it was a meteorite impact from geological evidence. The Alvarez theory. I’d still like to see it, says the man, and sets the dial. Of course, the one risk with time travel is that of two time travellers picking the exact same place and time, and materialising simultaneously – they’ll overlap and cause a colossal explosion. And as time travellers from the whole of history pop into existence over the Yucatan on the same day, they start overlapping and exploding, spreading iridium debris all round the world…
In it, a 22nd-century descendant of John F. Kennedy goes back in time to film the assassination. Overcome by emotion, he ends up causing the bullets to miss. Shortly afterward, it becomes apparent that doing so has so disrupted the fabric of space-time, that the reaction triggers a crisis that could lead to nuclear war, so he needs to go back and allow the event to occur.
A plotline used in two unusual places: Red Dwarf, in which the discovery that Kennedy’s survival causes a nuclear war causes a horrified Kennedy to insist that he be taken back in time and given a rifle so that he can shoot himself in order to get history back on track; and the non-SF thriller The Third Bullet, in which it’s outlined – not seriously – as the only possible explanation for the mysterious disappearance of the fatal bullet – a time traveller was sent back to prevent a nuclear war, and when Kennedy died and history changed, the time traveller and his bullet simply vanished.
Further to 68, I tried to google the story to see what the title was. One of the top results was me, describing the story here in 2012, and promising to come back when I found the title. I regret that I have not yet done so.
@65, @67: Is “Let’s Go to Golgotha” the one where a time tourist guide realises that everybody attending the crucifixion of Jesus is a time traveller – except for Jesus that is?
In Poul Anderson’s “There Will Be Time”, the crucifixion is a place to encounter other time travellers and recruit them to your time traveller club.
In Michael Moorcock’s “Behold the Man”, a time traveller wants to meet Jesus before he was famous, but he finds a family who are each the exact opposite of what he hopes to find – to be more specific may upset you. And so the time traveller decides to do a bit of identity theft and be Jesus.
I think I mostly bounced off another one where Jesus was an alien agent of a galactic organisation called the G.O.D. and he sort of strolled away after the crucifixion. Mission accomplished. More stuff happened.
Jo Walton’s Thessaly Trilogy is about an effort to recreate Plato’s Republic with real people. Athena uses her goddess time travel powers to populate it with everyone who prayed to her in Greek to live in Plato’s Republic (mostly? entirely? women who wanted a life of the mind before women were allowed to be educated (Plato’s Republic was the only advocacy of education for women for a *long* time), some children bought out of slavery, Socrates, some robots from our future to do the heavy lifting….
The results are what you might expect when a theory about how a society should work bumps up against actual people, though I can’t say I was expecting Christianity before the birth of Jesus. Also, the destruction of the colony by a volcano to avoid distorting the time line is looking a lot less jolly when the time is coming closer.
Season of Skulls by Charles Stross. Time travel of a sort, definitely strange effects.
In Larry Niven’s “Svetz” stories it turns out that actual time travel is impossible, so that our hero, in the course of his travels, is really passing into fantasy, as for example, when sent to retrieve animals to replenish an ecologically damaged Earth, he comes back with a horse with a horn growing from its forehead, lizards that can spout fire, and so on. At one point, he meets a werewolf, or what passes for one, at another he meets “Death”, more or less. In the novel “Rainbow Mars”, Svetz, attempting to gain past knowledge that would help to develop Earth’s current space program, finds himself facing H G Well’s Martians, as well as Stanley G Weinbaum’s, and C S Lewis’s (fortunately, it turns out well in the end).
“The universe is not only stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we can imagine.”
@74: I think “Svetz” isn’t exactly entering fantasy, but I haven’t read the one with Martians; yes, in the afterword of “The Flight of the Horse”, Niven explains that Svetz’s extension cage is “a fantasy vehicle”. Maybe he means figuratively.
My argument with the machine entering worlds of imagination is that in Svetz’s world there does not seem to be anybody who imagines those worlds or recognises them. We do it.
I prefer an interpretation that there are pre-existing parallel universes and their physical laws are fantasy-ish. Svetz’s time machine goes there, and the worlds look like our myths and fictions because our myths and fictions, some of them, the popular ones, are caused by storytellers and audience, or some of us, having a sub-conscious perception of those other worlds. Dreaming about them.
There’s a memorable older story by another author, which I will increasingly spoil by describing and then naming it. If I’m remembering it right, people are found or are trained with an ability to commute from a dystopian American present into different past times and places – they think, or it appears; I think they aren’t fully cooperative – but they are actually living in fantasy worlds of their concept of the past. Where cigarettes aren’t unheard of – I said it’s an old story – in ancient Egypt or Rome, I forget. But it’s a fantasy past that they think they know about. That presumably they are constructing, consciously or not. That’s “Disappearing Act”, by Alfred Bester, from 1953. I think. Though in my head it was Isaac Asimov.
Rule number 1 for time travelers:
Don’t be your own grandparent!
Because when you screw, up the timeline, you screw up the timeline.
#75. Yes, that’s “Disappearing Act”.