Message #897

[Michelle Jahn]

Time travel as a means of creating historical divergences
This period also saw the publication of the time travel novel Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp where an American academic travels to the Italy of the Ostrogoths at the time of the Byzantine invasion led by Belisarius. De Camp's work is concerned with the historical changes wrought by his time traveler, Martin Padway, thereby making the work an alternate history. Padway is depicted as making permanent changes and implicitly forming a new time branch.

Time travel as the cause of a point of divergence (creating two histories where before there was one, or simply replacing the future that existed before the time traveling event) has continued to be a popular theme: in Bring the Jubilee, by Ward Moore, the protagonist, who lives in an alternate history in which the South won the Civil War, travels through time and brings about a Union victory in the Battle of Gettysburg.

When a story's assumptions about the nature of time travel lead to the complete replacement of the visited time's future rather than just the creation of an additional time line, the device of a "time patrol" is often used. Such an agency has the grim task of saving civilization every day, every hour, with patrol members—depicted most notably in Poul Anderson's "Time Patrol"—racing uptime and downtime to preserve the "correct" history. This is eventually revealed to be the one in which humanity transforms itself into a benevolent super-species that, amongst other achievements, creates time travel to ensure its own existence.

This can lead to terrible moral dilemmas. In Delenda Est, the interference of time-travelling outlaws causes Carthage to win the Second Punic War and destroy Rome. As a result, there is a completely different Twentieth Century—"not better or worse, just completely different". The hero, Patrol Agent Manse Everard, must return to that period, fight the outlaws and change history back, restoring his (and our) familiar history—but only at the price of totally destroying the world that has taken its place, and which is equally deserving of existence. The stakes are the highest imaginable: billions of lives balanced against other billions of lives, for one man to decide. "Risking your neck in order to negate a world full of people like yourself" is how the hero describes what he eventually undertakes.

A more recent example is Making History by Stephen Fry, in which a time machine is used to alter history so that Adolf Hitler was never born. Despite this however, a different leader rose to prominence in Nazi Germany, taking advantage of the economic downturn. This leader turns out to be more intelligent, charismatic and ruthless than Hitler. The outcome of this new leader results in Nazi success in World War II, the extermination of the entire Jewish population, a cold war between Germany and the US, and the prevention of post-war attitude changes that led to the decriminalization of homosexuality and racial segregation.

[edit] Cross-time stories
H.G. Wells' "cross-time"/"many universes" variant (see above) was fully developed by De Camp in his 1940 short story "The Wheels of If" (Unknown Fantasy Fiction, October 1940), in which the hero is repeatedly shifted from one alternate history to another, each more remote from our own than the last.