Who among us has not dreamed over getting a do-over? Perhaps this time around, one could defer the two-hour discourse on the history of stirrups until the second date, leave the nearly-red hot frying pan to cool a little longer, or at the very least, take steps to ensure that some major historical debacle never happens, changing the course of human events for the good of all. Armed with knowledge of how things played out in the original timeline, surely one could shape a more perfect history!
That’s in reality. In fiction, of course, there’s no plot if everything goes as expected. Thus, these five works about altering timelines that did not, alas, work out entirely to plan.
“Try And Change the Past” by Fritz Leiber (1958)
The Changewar was a long struggle between the Spiders and the Snakes to reshape universal history. Using time-change techniques to preventing his own impending murder made perfect sense to a nameless recruit in the wars. This is how he gained a deeper, personal appreciation of the Law of Conservation of Reality. History can be changed…but not easily.
Replay by Ken Grimwood (1986)
October 18, 1988: not only is Jeff Winston trapped in a dead-end radio job and ensnarled in a failed marriage he doesn’t know how to end, but he’s also having a fatal heart attack. Rather than unending oblivion, what awaits him is 1963. Young again, armed with the knowledge of how history played out the first time, it’s easy for Jeff to amass a fortune while side-stepping all the errors he made the first time he lived. There are only two catches:
- Avoiding old errors is easy; avoiding committing new ones is hard.
- Whatever he does, there is a fatal heart attack waiting for him on October 18, 1988.
No worries, however; each death brings new resurrection and more changes to get things right. Or terribly wrong.
Branch Point by Mona Clee (1996)
In 1962, the United States of America crushed the Soviet Union. All it took were the deaths of millions and the gradual extinction of all life on Earth, thanks to radioactive fallout, ozone depletion, and nuclear winter. A century later, a trio of time travelers are dispatched from a dying Earth to 1962 to prevent the Cuban crisis from spiraling into a thermonuclear exchange, thus saving humanity and most other species on the planet.
Preventing the nuclear war of 1962 proves easy enough. Preventing nuclear war entirely is another matter. Again and again, the US and USSR turn their growing arsenals on each other, dooming the biosphere in the process. Again and again the travelers intervene. However, American and Russian ingenuity for finding pretexts to start WWIII seems inexhaustible, which cannot be said for their time machine’s fuel supply.
The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya by Nagaru Tanigawa (2004)
Alien emissary Yuki Nagato, time traveler Mikuru Asahina, ESPer Itsuki Koizumi, and perfectly unremarkable student Kyon: all work tirelessly to keep reality warper Haruhi Suzumiya from realizing she is effectively a god. The task requires endless labour monitoring an energetic egotist, labour that receives very little in the way of reward. Small wonder that one of the quartet eventually tires of the endless task. When the opportunity presents itself, Haruhi is erased from reality. Madcap adventures are replaced by humdrum tedium. Haruhi is forgotten by all of her former monitors, save one: Kyon remembers the history that once was.
A sensible person would welcome a respite from Haruhi’s chaos. Kyon cannot resist investigating the mystery: whodunnit? The puzzle turns out to be easy to solve. Kyon now has to decide whether to embrace the new, boring Haruhi-less world or restore history to the terrifying but entertaining version in which an oblivious god walked the Earth.
Alice Payne Arrives by Kate Heartfield (2018)
The Guides see time travel as the means by which to steer humanity toward utopia. The Farmers, skeptical that Guide efforts will produce the desired results, attempt to preserve history. The net result: history has been altered but mostly for the worse. Rather than forestalling wars, conflicts linger longer and are far bloodier.
Determined to bring a dramatic end to the Guide/Farmer time war, disillusioned Farmer agent Prudence convinces herself that the genius 18th-century inventor Jane Hodgson is an ideal patsy. However, Prudence’s bold scheme overlooks Jane’s patron, Alice Payne. Rejecting the options convention offers to mixed-race upper-class Georgian women, Alice operates as a dashing highwayman under the nom de crime of the Holy Ghost. The brilliant and adorable Jane, with whom Alice is quite smitten, is a central part of Alice’s life. If some futuristic time traveler thinks they can seduce Jane away from Alice without a struggle, they are making the same fatal error plenty of Georgian men have made: underestimating Alice Payne.
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“If only…” features in many of our musings. It’s natural that it should feature in so many of our books. No doubt even now you yearn to suggest “James, if only you had mentioned …” Comments are below.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and the Aurora finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
Time and Time Again, by Ben Elton, is a good example.
It seems that there’s a time portal linking 2023 and 1914. Some people decide that this can be used to avoid the Great War from starting by saving Franz Ferdinand. What can go wrong?
The premise of Branch Point sounds similar to one of Niven’s Svetz stories — “Death in a Cage” (1973). But I guess it’s not that much of a coincidence; the Cuban Missile Crisis is a very natural thing to think about wrt time travel.
If you want a good film with time travel hijinks, you can’t do better than the Czech film Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea from 1977. It’s about a group of Nazis who plan to hijack a time traveling tourist rocket in order to give Hitler a handheld H-bomb, and, well, it doesn’t go according to plan. Hilariously great.
John Brunner’s ‘Times Without Number’ is a series of short stories about a Spanish operative, Don Miguel. The stories take place in a universe where the Spanish empire is still a going concern, time travel is a common (though heavily regulated) practice, and space travel is unknown. I found it to be a nice set of science-fictional detective stories and it also contains an unusually satisfying (to me, at least) treatment of time travel.
I still think that “Anubis Gates” by Tim Powers pretty much retired the crown for this sort of story.
I loved Branch Point, which I just read this past summer (I purchased a copy in 2003 but that was well after there were too many unread books lying around in my possession). It’s very clever, and (a little bit cheekily) challenges the reader to spot the subtle points at which world history keeps diverging from the nonfictional timeline out here. The fascinating resolution makes astonishingly good use of dramatic but little-known parts of the colonial history of the Americas.
This sort of thing appeals to me easily so I’m making a note of the rest of the titles mentioned here.
I also liked Joe Haldeman’s The Accidental Time Machine, though the conclusion seemed kind of arbitrary to me.
H. Beam Piper had a couple of short stories along these lines; “Time and Time Again” has a man dying in a nuclear war who wakes up as a child again in 1945 and sets out to change history. (References in one or two later stories imply he succeeds.) On the other end of the spectrum, “Flight From Tomorrow” and “Hunter Patrol” end up with closed loops.
Stephen Fry wrote Making History, putting a dark and comedic spin on the old chestnut “what if Hitler had never been born”.
One Day All This Will Be Yours, by Adrian Tchaikovsky is told by the last survivor of the Time Wars, who has set up a means to prevent further monkeying with the futures, and in his narrative, he eventually explains what happened to the timeline due to the wars.
On TV, the Legends of Tomorrow have turned this into their motto: “Sometimes we screw things up for the better.”
See also the short story “Duce” by William Sanders: Time-travelling future Nazi agents and time-travelling future Jewish resistance fighters show up at the same time in Rome to either prevent or allow Benito Mussolini to die in an automobile accident, whichever outcome will affect their home-futures to their own benefits, even if it means their own annihilation (in that they may then cease to exist if their source time-lines are altered).
All You Zombies by Robert Heinlein. The movie version-Predestination-is also pretty good.
Someone needs to bring Branch Point back into print. It’s a cool time travel novel.
– Michael A. Burstein
@12 I would also mention “By His Bootstraps,” written some 15 years earlier which he expanded and re-wrote as “All You Zombies.” This is the story that gave us the phrase “Bootsteps Paradox.” I personally find it a better story.
I would also suggest an oldie but a goodie: “The Weapon Shops of Isher” by A. E. VanVogt. He took the original short story and gave it a framing story involving time travel that concludes with one of the best lines in all of Sci-Fi where our timne-traveling hero, having accumulated tons of temporal potential energy, finds himself billions of years in the past in a formless void and realizes that he would not witness, but would be the cause of the creation of the universe.
There’s a video I’m fond of: “I’m You, Dickhead”. Guy goes back in time to try to get his younger self to play guitar, so his elder self can get laid.
The mention of “All You Zombies” above reminded me that, allowing for a mix of time-travel and Many Worlds, we could also throw in David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself and David Ambrose’s The Man Who Turned Into Himself. I enjoyed the heck out of both. Gerrold’s novel is the classic, and much gutsier about twists; Ambrose’s is a little more tame in terms of the mechanics, but doesn’t suffer for it, since it’s accessible and poignant and funny.
In this vein, but with an LGBTQ+ angle on it, there is also a lovely little microfiction story out there by @capsule_169_feed3 on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/capsule_169/status/993963705791545344
Probably the most interesting time travel story I’ve read recently is Elan Mastai’s All Our Wrong Todays (from 2018, which seems like a long time ago now). The twist is that the time traveler’s screwup changes his utopia and he arrives in what’s basically our contemporary world, which he sees as a dystopia.
There was talk of a film adaptation; now it seems there’s work on it as a streaming series.
The First Fifteen Lives Of Harry August by Claire North has a premise that sounds similar to Replay, but taken in a different direction. I quite enjoyed it.
One of my favorites is Bradbury’s short story, A Sound of Thunder, written in 1953. A classic example of what could go wrong, no matter how hard one tries to prevent it. And also, a possible inspiration for Edward Lorenz’ chaos theory term, “the butterfly effect.”
The Chronicles of St. Mary’s by Jodi Taylor (although they do not do time travel, they investigate major historical events in contemporary time). The first book is Just One Damned Thing After Another. She also has a somewhat-related series about the Time Police.
@20 – I’ve given a lot of thought about A Sound of Thunder since 2016, and what I’ve concluded is this: If your election comes down to the moderate and the fascist, things have already gone very badly wrong. You can’t blame the butterflies for that.
Barrington Bayley’s The Fall of Chronopolis is worth a mention.
@14: I would also mention “By His Bootstraps,” written some 15 years earlier which he expanded and re-wrote as “All You Zombies.” Huh? They’re both short; I vaguely recall “Zombies” as being the shorter of the two, and it’s certainly more compact (a bar story instead of a span of years). And they’re wildly dissimilar stories.
@0: The rich idiot in “A Gun for Dinosaur” comes to a particularly … sticky … end when he tries to change the past. Not as complex as the examples you provide, but it’s just a short story.
@12 I would argue that All You Zombies is anything but messy – everything seems to get tidied up… :)
Well it’s anime based on a video game, which normally would make me want to run away, but “Steins;Gate” is quite good. Different characters at different times have access to different methods of time travel, starting with being able to send text messages back in time. However only one character can remember the timeline as it was before it was changed. No wonder everyone else thinks he’s a bit crazy.
Laumer’s Dinosaur Beach and Garfinkle’s “All of an Instant” – now those get messy.
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is definitely a time-travel story with a lot of messiness happening in it.
@3 Absolutely agree. Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself With Tea (1977) is brilliant and hilarious. The last half hour is a breathtaking exercise in the consequences of time travel. The film was made in an era of Czech fantasy and science fiction films that are positively amazing. Pity is it’s not better known.
@22 In 1952 the choice was between a character witness for the defense of Alger Hiss and a WWII General most known for playing golf. Bradbury was prescient.
A Roger Zelazny short story has aliens mucking with our timeline as a game. It’s called “The Game of Blood and Dust” and the aliens keep jumping back in Earth’s history to make changes to find out if we destroy ourselves with nucear weapons or not. Three movies each. One plays “blood” (humans survive) and the other plays “dust” (nuclear extermination).
The End of Eternity, Isaac Asimov
@3, @29 – The whole film is on line here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tVBPNfKfgNo
I think that’s the version with English subtitles
It’s been on YouTube for several years so presumably the copyright situation is OK. Starts with 30 seconds or so that looks like a tourist film before the silliness begins.
Thomas Covenant final quartet.
Heinlein did not invent the bootstraps phrase and didn’t pretend to.
Wrong Way Street by Niven, not so famous but I enjoyed it. Also “Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation” by the same author.
And of course, Sound of Thunder, worth it for Bradbury’s poetic prose alone.
@36: I think “Wrong Way Street” was the first Niven I read.
Charlie Stross did two rather weird space opera novels Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise involving the potential for time travel via FTL, and what one might term a “weakly god-like” power policing human civilization to keep us from too badly altering the universe and wiping ourselves out or crashing existence via time paradoxes – then he gave up on the series because he felt he had written himself into some corners he couldn’t get out of.
He also wrote the novella ‘Palimpsest’ which is 100% time travel getting messy to the Nth degree – the training/induction/brainwashing process for time agent recruits includes murdering your grandfather earlier in the training, eliminating your previous life from the timeline, and ends with cutting the throat of yourself-a-few-seconds ago, leaving you utterly rootless in the currently valid timeline. These are the people who are then charged with keeping timelines stable. Paradoxically, it works too well.
As I recall James Hogan’s Thrice Upon A Time is pretty good, absent the shouty-voiced libertarianism in his later novels. The computer technology is horribly dated by today’s standards, relative to other technology, but the story still works.
It’s a slightly different spin from your main premise, in that the experimental physics group who were investigating trans-luminal information transfer keep getting messages with tips to solve their future problems, from their future selves who are ready to rewrite themselves out of the X days, weeks, or months of life to prevent disastrous trouble of one kind or another. However, with each disaster they successfully prevent or dodge, the scope of the new incoming disasters seems to get worse and worse…
@36: The fascinating thing about Nivens ‘Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation’ is that the physics might still be considered possible, as I understand it.
Although Stephen Hawking argued against it, if I correctly understand the summaries I’ve seen his arguments did not conclusively refute Tipler’s calculations under current general relativity, given the right physical conditions of rapidly rotating ultra-massive cylindrical or near-cylindrical objects, and so failed to completely eliminate the potential for time loops, aka “closed time-like curves” in spacetime, or the more concerning nearly-closed ones. Then again I don’t come near understanding the math so perhaps Hawking did disprove it.
Nooo! The dreaded name surfaces. Maybe it’s a rule of these comment threads: after three dozen or so comments, he must appear, like Candyman.
Things always get messy! That’s why time travel gives me headaches.
Shrike58 @@@@@ 5
“I still think that “Anubis Gates” by Tim Powers pretty much retired the crown for this sort of story.”
Just so. I came to this conversation to say exactly that. The Anubis Gates is the most wonderful of all Tim Powers’ wonderful books.
Two books by Connie Willis have to be mentioned. The Doomsday Book, where an immunized time traveller gets caught in the Black Plague and the much lighter To Say Nothing of the Dog which I won’t give away the plot for. I highly recommend both of them.
In Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol stories, time travel gets messy by definition.
Time travel getting messy is why the Patrol gets involved.
The Door into Summer involved time travel and cold sleep (plus a rather amusing take on who Leonardo da Vinci really was…
I stand corrected regarding the relationship between “By His Bootstraps” and “All You Zombies”–for unclear reasons I was thinking of “Against the Fall of Night” and “The City and the Stars.”
I however stand by the (well-documented) notion that the Bootstrap Paradox (first mentioned in the mid 1800’s as a man pulling himself out of a swamp by his own hair) was placed into the science fiction playbook as the time-travel paradox by this short story. Heinlein did not create the phrase, but the notion of the Bootstrap Paradox in relation to time travel comes from here.
Anything by Jack Finney that involves time travel–you can count on <i>something</i> going haywire, hilariously so in <i>The Woodrow Wilson Dime</i> and more seriously in <i> Time and Again</i> and <i>From Time to Time</i>.
Stanislaw Lem’s “The Seventh Voyage” from The Star Diaries is time travel (of a sort). Things certainly get rather messy.
One of my favourite Lem short stories.
James P Hogan, The Proteus Operation (commandos go back in time to prevent Germany from winning WW2)
Harry Turtledove, The Guns of the South (apartheid fanatics go back in time tryna help the Confederacy win the Civil War)
Stephen King, 11/22/63 (stopping Oswald has consequences)
Groundhog Day (dumping your attitude is HARD)
The 4th thru 6th seasons of LOST (which I flatly refuse to try to summarize)
Trying to recall a short story by, I think, Asimov, along these lines:
A professor and his protégé travel back in time and retrieve an actual, authentic American document from the founding of the nation, thinking to get rich… only to have it declared a fraud because the ink was too fresh!
Cannot recall the title…
@49
Cannot help with that one but Asimov did write a story called The Immortal Bard, where the physicist and English lit prof were talking at a faculty party and the physicist was talking about his research in time travel. He had tried bringing great minds from the past, mostly scientists, to the present, but they freaked out and had nervous breakdowns. So he went for someone he thought would have a more flexible mindset and had fetched Shakespeare. The English prof freaks out, especially when the physicist says he enrolled the guy in the professor’s Shakespeare Appreciation class. Prof remembers an older student with a funny accent. He asked where Shakespeare is so he can meet him. Physicist says he had to send him back to his own time because the experience was just too humiliating. Huh? asks the prof. Physicist says, “I didn’t have any other choice. It was a Shakespeare appreciation class and you flunked him.”
Asimov was commenting on academic interpretation vs authorial intent but it’s still funny…
@50 Love it…
Asimov also wrote a series of stories about the fictitious compound thiotimoline, which dissolved 1.12 seconds before you added it to water. The first was called “The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline”. He wrote it to prepare himself to write his Ph.D. dissertation, and was really surprised when he was asked a question about it during his thesis defense
Fritz Leiber’s Try and Change the Past, where a newly enrolled Time Agent tries to prevent his own death.
How about L. Sprague de Camp’s Aristotle and the Gun?
Time traveler visits Aristotle to teach him empirical science. Get the scientific revolution started early.
Where is the Time Patrol when you need it?
https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781625791450/9781625791450___3.htm
@49
Button Button
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Button,_Button_(Asimov_short_story)
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the obvious Mark Twain – A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court.
A trio of stories in the 1980s by Warren Salomon, about the hard-boiled time detective Ben Hardy: “Time and Punishment,” “Time on My Hands” and “As Time Goes By”
Fritz Lieber’s The Big Time is an oldie but goodie.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32256