The larger the organization, the more likely it needs something like a bureaucracy… which both adds efficiency and harms efficiency. Bureaucracies, alas, are known for their office politics and endless red tape. This leads many to believe that bold innovations are best created and deployed by individuals (or at least small groups). This kind of effort also makes for good science fiction plots.
Consider these five works about time travel as practiced on a small scale.
The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold (1973)
Daniel Eakins expected to inherit his uncle Jim’s vast estate. Instead, Daniel was presented with $6000.00 and a fancy belt. The sting of disappointment faded as soon as Daniel discovered that the fancy belt was a fully functional time machine1.
The belt provides Daniel the means to pursue hedonism on an epic scale. Daniel can and does shape history to his taste, eliminating developments that might inconvenience him2, while indulging his very particular sexual inclinations. It would be a perfect life, at least for Daniel… if only he didn’t age.
Daniel’s preferred bed partner is another version of Daniel; some of these analogs are women, but most of them are men. Daniel wonders if this means he is gay. Many readers might conclude Daniel is just tremendously self-absorbed.
The Wizard Children of Finn by Mary Tannen (1981)
To protect Deimne from the Sons of Morna, witch Bovmall transported Deimne to a place and time far from his would-be killers. Specifically, to the estate of eleven-year-old Fiona and eight-year-old Bran McCool’s Uncle Rupert. The trio become chums, which is why when Bovmall returns Deimne to his native Ireland, the siblings accompany him.
Deimne has a hero’s path ahead of him. The boy, well versed in heroic narratives, is quite familiar with what destiny demands of him. Fiona and Bran, in contrast, find themselves in the heroic adventurer’s equivalent of the Actor’s Nightmare. An actor who flubs a line might get jeered by the audience. Adventurers who fumble their line could well end up dead.
One gets the impression that the heroic adventurers + faithful bard combination is extremely successful… except of course there’s a significant survivorship bias there. None of the bards who died horribly along with their companion ever got to celebrate those histories.
Making History by Stephen Fry (1996)
Leo Zuckerman is working on a time machine. Leo also has a dreadful secret he struggles to come to terms with. Leo is not a Jew, as he believed. Leo is the son of a Nazi war criminal. Leo and his mother appropriated the names of a dead Jewish mother and her child at the end of World War II.
Enter feckless historian Michael Young, led to Leo by misaddressed mail. Michael proposes that Leo use the time machine to come to terms with his past by utterly altering that past. All Michael need do is eliminate Hitler. After all, it’s not as if Hitler had been the beneficiary of existing social forces or that in Hitler’s absence, an even greater monster might take his place. Right?
One might expect that Michael would be alarmed to find himself in a new world, one where the Nazis decisively won, Britain was crushed, the Soviet Union was nuked, and the Jews completely exterminated, not to mention horrified by his own role in the matter. Michael is impressively self-centered, so the only thing that motivates him to try to fix what he helped break is his discovery that among the many liberalizations that did not happen in this history was the legalization of homosexuality. This inconveniences bisexual Michael personally; thus, he acts.
Broadway Revival by Laura Frankos (2021)
Recently bereaved David Greenbaum could not save his husband. Nor is David much interested in therapy. Instead, David opts to assuage his grief by an entirely novel approach: steal a time machine, travel back to 1934, and save George Gershwin.
Gershwin is merely the first name on a long laundry list of people David intends to save. Armed with detailed knowledge of the era, not to mention drugs as yet undeveloped in 1934, David establishes himself as an empresario of note, then guides performers from Gershwin to Lorenz Hart away from their historical dooms. The catch? The more successful David is, the less he can depend on his knowledge of the era to guide him.
Readers should be aware that David is extremely focused on Broadway and that he views other famous events of 1930s solely in terms of how they affected Broadway3. However, because his focus is extremely specific, he manages to accomplish more of his goals than many other time travelers have been able to do.
Macy Murdoch, created by JP Larocque & Jessica Meya (2023)
The great-great-great-granddaughter of famed Toronto detective William Murdoch, 21st century teen Macy Murdoch takes pride in her famed ancestor. Thus, should the means to clear Murdock of the crime for which he was framed back in 1910 present itself, Macy would not hesitate to take advantage of it.
Enter the mysterious, seemingly abandoned time machine. Macy and her friends commandeer the device and travel back to 1910. Once there, however, it becomes evident that clearing William Murdoch’s name will be considerably more difficult than anticipated.
Fans of this series who plan to visit Toronto should be aware that not every building conceals a functioning time machine. After all, we need space to store all the illicit tunnel boring machines, death rays, and rudimentary suborbital rockets Toronto’s thriving communities of visionary geniuses have created over the decades.
These are just a few stories about what one person (or a small group) can accomplish, given only determination and a time machine. Perhaps I omitted your favourites. If so, feel free to extol their virtues in comments below.
- Complete with documentation, so he need not worry about e.g. traveling back to 20,000 BP to find himself solidly embedded in a continental ice sheet. ↩︎
- There’s no evidence in Daniel’s preferred histories of Women’s Lib or the Civil Rights Movement, so far as I can see. ↩︎
- At least Daniel has done his homework. Harry Harrison’s A Rebel in Time has as its antagonist a man who relies overmuch on a single text, Ordeal by Fire by Fletcher Pratt, a short history that omits any mention of John Brown or why the bad guy might want to avoid Harper’s Ferry on October 16, 1859. ↩︎
Two more: Poul Anderson’s There Will Be Time and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred. Both feature individuals stepping through time and grappling with the implications of the fact history is fixed, but with very different narrative ends.
Does Bester’s The Men Who Murdered Mohammed fit the bill?
In the third footnote, did you mean “David has done his homework” rather than “Daniel”?
I don’t believe so.
Recently bereaved David Greenbaum could not save his husband. Nor is David much interested in therapy. Instead, David opts to assuage his grief by an entirely novel approach: steal a time machine, travel back to 1934, and save George Gershwin.
Gershwin is merely the first name on a long laundry list of people David intends to save. Armed with detailed knowledge of the era, not to mention drugs as yet undeveloped in 1934, David establishes himself as an empresario of note, then guides performers from Gershwin to Lorenz Hart away from their historical dooms. The catch? The more successful David is, the less he can depend on his knowledge of the era to guide him.
Readers should be aware that David is extremely focused on Broadway and that he views other famous events of 1930s solely in terms of how they affected Broadway3. However, because his focus is extremely specific, he manages to accomplish more of his goals than many other time travelers have been able to do.
Ah, braino. I meant the protagonist of Broadway reminds me of the antagonist in the Harrison.
So you meant to compare the protagonist of the Broadway book to Gerrold’s protagonist? I find it unclear, since the rest of that footnote is about someone else entirely.
How exactly is modern knowledge going to save Gershwin from glioblastoma, which is fast-moving and fatal even today?
Hi, Greg. In BROADWAY REVIVAL, I’m operating on a number of assumptions. First, that Gershwin had something going on in his brain as early as 1934, when he was having olfactory problems (smelling burning rubber, etc), headaches, and gastrointestinal symptoms—all of which can stem from slower growing brain tumors. There are even some studies today that hold doctors of his era should have recognized it well before his rapid decline in summer 1937. Next, we’re doing incredible research today into specifically targeting brain tumors; I’m counting on that work to expand even further by 2078. And finally—likely the biggest assumption of all—I’m postulating that such treatment could by administered by my protagonist. I wrote BROADWAY REVIVAL because the fates took Gershwin (and other Broadway greats) from us too damn soon. The improbability levels may be high, but I saw it as the only way to get a Great White Way even greater than our timeline gave us.
Read the book. It’s fun, even if you know nothing about 1930’s Broadway.
It’s the definition of a low-stakes story but I found it charming.
Because it’s modern medicine from an era in our future.
Time for me to mention the 1997 BBC series Crime Traveller: the time machine developed by Holly Turner’s late father has a range of mere hours – not enough to kill Hitler or make a fortune on the stock market, but enough for detective Jeff Slade to unravel the mysteries of recently committed crimes.
I would also mention the almost as restrictive device in Seven Days, which can be used to prevent disasters, provided the critical inciting event happened within that one-week time span. But there is a pretty considerable (not to mention suspect) bureaucracy attached to this one.
Strictly limited peeks into the future – the “tomorrow’s newspaper today” story – were part of Unknown magazine’s stock in trade; variations on the theme include Robert Arthur’s “Tomorrow” (June 1942) in which the inside of the protagonist’s house is one day ahead of the rest of the universe, and Nelson S. Bond’s “Cartwright’s Camera” (November 1940) featuring the eponymous device, which has been knocked out of alignment with the fourth dimension and takes photographs of the next day.
I read about Crime Traveller recently, and I wasn’t clear on how it worked as a “solving murders” series, since the summaries gave the impression that the murders were solved but had still happened, which seems a strange outcome — if they can go back in time to before the murders, I’d expect them to prevent them, not simply “solve” them.
Seven Days was rather ridiculous. The episodic format required there to be crises catastrophic enough to require time travel on a weekly basis, which raises the question, if catastrophes are so common in that universe, how did the world ever survive long enough for a time machine to be invented? Or conversely, why did catastrophes suddenly become so much more frequent as soon as there was a time machine available to undo them? (As I recall, it also rather glossed over the question of what happened to the week-ago version of the guy when he traveled into his past.)
A long time since I saw it and I wasn’t a big fan for precisely this reason – Crime Traveller seemed to work on the basis that the past has already happened and can’t be changed, even in tiny ways; the example was attempts to buy lottery tickets etc. which somehow didn’t make it into the computer to let the hero win. All you could do is observe and try to spot details which can be verified to convict the criminal in the present – how the detectives could be there observing without distupting the time line was never really explained.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Rowling got the idea of the Time Turner from this show.
That seems unlikely. For one thing, fixed-history time travel is an old trope that’s been used in many books and films. For another, Crime Traveller came out in 1997, only a couple of years before Prisoner of Azkaban, which is cutting it very close. Apparently Rowling had the whole series outlined in broad strokes as far back as 1990 or so. Undoubtedly she revised and rethought things as she went, as any author would, but the Time Turner is so integral to the climax of PoA that it seems unlikely to have been a late addition.
And that’s more time devoted to thinking about J.K. Rowling than I ever hoped to do again.
The main character in The Perfect Run has the ability to create time loops. He can create a save point and reset again and again until events happen exactly how he wants, then he creates a new save to make it the “real” timeline. By the start of story, he’s had the ability for four years, but is almost a thousand years old.
Thank you for the tip on The Perfect Run.
Hermione Granger’s Time Turner (in the third Harry Potter book) is a good example of a fairly limited form of time travel – limited range and intended mainly to let the character attend two classes at the same time. You can’t change the past, but you can cause events that you know happened. This implies that someone who knows nothing about prior events can change everything, which probably wasn’t quite what Rowling had in mind…
No, it just means that they won’t know in advance that their choices will have been what caused things to happen in the first place. The Time Tunnel used the same logic — Tony and Doug couldn’t change anything that was in the history books, but when it came to events that history never recorded, they had no way of knowing the outcome and so it was worth trying to make a difference, since maybe they succeeded all along but they just didn’t know it in advance.
Skyrim, the fifth game in the Elder Scrolls series, is largely about the consequences of hurling your greatest enemy forward in time, when surely your descendants will not have multiple other major issues to contend with and will have a unified and well-trained response prepared for his eventual arrival.
In Sheckley’s “Slaves of Time” the protagonist invents a time machine and ends up encountering many versions of himself, much as in the Gerrold. However, since it’s a Sheckley story it’s not very similar otherwise (based on the description here – I have not actually read the Gerrold).
The current ebook edition of “The Man Who Folded Himself” has been updated from the original. The dates in the protagonist’s present have been incremented by 30 years, and various technologies, events, and descriptions (including the time belt) have been modified accordingly.
I don’t think it’s a very successful updating: TMWFH is a very 1970s story in many ways. And time continues to march on, so e.g., updating records to CDs doesn’t help it feel contemporary in the streaming era anyway. But the changes are at least mostly harmless– it’s still the same story rather than substantially revising any of the plot beats or characters.
Ronald Wright’s A Scientific Romance involves the discovery of the the damaged but repairable time machine that was the basis for H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, which unaccountably reappeared in a late 20th-Century London squat without its operator, and the efforts of its discoverer to use it to change the outcomes of his own personal past. Whether or not he finds that he can return to his past remains unresolved, but in the future he finds that the friend who helped him re-launch the time machine was charged with his murder, which suggests that he can’t.
And of course there’s Commander Vimes’s experience with time travel in Night Watch, but as I recall, he had History Monks to help him.
Not referring to either of those stories, but one read of time travel to the future is that you land in a future where history says you disappeared one day. If you’re the hero, it is probably a bad future.. Then you can go back to your starting time and do things to prevent the bad future, since now you didn’t disappear after all.
Or a variant is when someone from the future comes to your present to prevent their bad future. This may even be your future self. Usually if they succeed, this makes them disappear, because now they never happened.
However, there’s one Marvel Comics story about a hostel where several people live who came back in time to prevent various events (or are otherwise cosmologically orphaned), they are still around, and they decided not to join the X-Men whose members have been about fifty percent this sometimes.
The protagonist of the game Life is Strange can time travel on a very limited scale. When she tries to do bigger changes, life changes completely (in a disastrous way).
I just reread Michael Swanwick’s Triceratops Summer- a charming story about time loops.
Steins;Gate does this is really interesting ways! I’m not a big time-travel person, but I love the way it was done in that show
Starts off insanely goofy with sending emails across time (“We’ll call it D-Mail — DeLorean Mail!”) but later in the series I’m crying over the way things have developed.
Glimpses, by Lewis Shiner, is a time-travel novel about the greatest 1960s rock & roll albums that were never made. Until Ray Shakleford was imagining an unreleased take of “The Long and Winding Road”, heard it coming out of the speaker on his stereo, and recorded it. But Ray’s life is falling apart, and the fact that he can actually travel in time doesn’t help. Shiner’s writing bring the musicians to life and it’s easy to imagine Ray seeing them for real and the intense attraction of the chance to being there and save the music. It won the World Fantasy Award. Really one of the best fantasy novels ever. Available for a free download on Shiner’s website.
I lost interest in the book when we get the long “Wouldn’t it be fun to go back in time and hang out with Brian Wilson?” section.
Although I wanted to send Shiner a copy of SMILE when it finally did come out.
[reads description f Macy Murdoch]
WHAT
As far as I know, the Detective Murdoch novels by Maureen Jennings on which the Murdoch serieses are based are straight-up historical police procedurals, as were the Peter Outerbridge adaptations, Except the Dying, Poor Tom Is Cold and Under the Dragon’s Tail. I am not sure why the TV decided to add tunneling machines, rockets, and all of Murdoch’s inventions.
I just realized I’ve never crammed a gratuitous reference to Engels’ The Bear into any of these pieces.
Well, the foot of this very page is presently showing a quote, not from that – I don’t know if it changes –
““A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand Of Darkness
See also Never The Twain (1987) by Kim Mitchell. A descendant of Bret Harte discovers a time-travel method, and goes back to derail Mark Twain’s literary career, which he believes led to the the eclipse of his ancestor’s potential for greater fame and fortune. He plans to follow the events Twain depicted in Roughing It, enabling Twain to become wealthy in the gold rush and forego become an author instead.
In Slaughterhouse Five, the protagonist Billy Pilgrim experiences his life in a random order, which I’d argue is a kind of time travel.
MAKING HISTORY won the Sidewise Award for alternate history in its year.
I’m not sure I fully understand the brief, but I think Lest Darkness Fall, one of my favourites, qualifies, in that it involves only a single individual, Martin Padway, being blipped back to the time of Justinian and the beginning of the war between the Byzantines and the Ostrogoths. That he prevents the fall of the Ostrogoths and the resulting ‘Dark Ages’ is not exactly a limited scale thing, but there you go.
Obligatory Star Trek reference: ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ has McCoy inadvertently helping Germany win WWII and thus change all of history. Fortunately, Kirk and Spock manage to fix things in time for the next episode.
The Lincoln Hunters (1958) by Wilson Tucker. Time traveler from 26th century goes back to 1858 to record Lincoln’s “lost speech”, delivered in Bloomington, Illinois at the first state Republican convention on May 29, 1856. Legend had it that it was so inspiring that no-one actually took notes, and only a brief summary of it is known.
Loved the Japanese Movie “Summer Time Machine Blues”, where a group of students finds a time machine and they decide to travel to the day before to find the remote for their aircon, which has inexplicably gone missing.
The Broadway Book sounds very promising.
There’s an alternate history where a Zionist kills Hitler, prompting a pogrom that killed 10,000 German Jews. Years afterwards the killer is reviled — like Hitler would have done any worse to the Jews?
My favorite alt.history moment with Hitler is the British TV show the Misfists. One episode an attempt to kill Hitler that goes awry and makes things worse. Another time-traveler goes back, kicks Hitler in the balls, fixes things, kicks Hitler in the balls again — “Oi, ‘itler — why you got to be SUCH A DICK?”
Thanks for the kind words, James. I am honored that you included BROADWAY REVIVAL in such illustrious company!
From the article teaser, my first thought was The Man Who Folded Himself, so I’m glad to see that as the first entry. Fun fact: I was entirely too young to have read that book when I did.