Has this time-travel story idea been used yet?

Cafe Society
1

The talk about aliens building the Pyramids got me thinking, even though I don’t believe aliens have ever come to Earth, if they even exist. I was trying to think what motivation an outside force would have for making ancient people build huge monuments.

I got the time travel idea. What if, in the far future, it is decided that we urgently need to change our past…some catastrophe that cannot be averted in time, perhaps, or perhaps even something that has no meaning to us but will be important in the future.

So they send some people back in time to warn us, but overshoot their mark by several thousand years, and end up in the age of pharoahs.

These time travellers can’t get back, but they need to deliver their message. They may have no more knowledge of our last ten thousand years than we have about pre-historic times - or maybe they do know a lot, and have had their minds enhanced to have encyclopedic knowledge of all historical times…it could go either way. Anyway, they want to make sure their message lasts long enough that the intended audience hears it, so they coerce the natives into building huge solid structures that can endure thousands of years. They are probably effectively immortal (considering they come from the far future) so they will have plenty of time.

There’s a couple of approaches one could do to a story like this. My first idea would be to follow someone who has determined the fact that the pyramids are a message, and that it was someone from the future that left it, but nobody can understand the message - it’s intended for the people of 10,000 AD.

My second idea would be to track the lives of the time travellers, and show how they rose to power, and how living lost in the past and being entrusted with a task that will take centuries to complete changes them.

2

Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote a similar novel – I forget the title – in which a race of time-traveling aliens leaves information encoded in the DNA of the natives (us).

The information is in a particular bloodline, and tied to the fact that the males of this bloodline have yellow-colored eyes. Our hero has yellow eyes, and is therefore targeted for capture in the present, when the invasion begins.

3

It really doesn’t matter if the idea’s been used before or not. What matters is that the author writes a good story from it.

Though the idea is somewhat similar to that in a Kurt Vonnegut novel (I keep thinking Slaughterhouse Five, but maybe not), in which the Great Wall of China and other ancient landmarks were overseen by Trafalmadorian aliens and, when viewed from space, are messages in their language.

4

Time’s a Wastin’!

(Badtz Maru, you have a book to write)

…And, yes, you can use anything I said here as a title.

5

Terry Pratchett wrote both that the London orbital motorway is in the shape of the satanic symbol Odegra, which no one knows but the outside forces which contrived it to happen; and that pyramids themselves warp the fabric of time, making their contents somewhat more literally immortal.

No plot is completely original. Everything’s been done in Star Trek. Go for it. Sounds cool.

6

Please write your book Badtz. I’d like to read it.

7

It was Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan. A Tralfamadorian courier has been marooned on Saturn’s moon Titan, and his home planet is using their advanced technology to influence Earthlings to build huge monuments that resemble phrases in the Tral language, telling the courier of their ongoing efforts to get a spare part to him that will repair his ship. In some cases, empires fall before their messages can be completed. For the most part, the phrases are pretty banal, along the lines of “Be ready to pack your bags on short notice”.

8

I remember in Umberto Eco’s “Focault’s Pendulum” the same sort of plot, although there was no time travel.

It is a book about secret societies, but his main characters’ focus on the group of Knights of the Templar after the Crusades. As the story goes, after the heads of the Templars were executed the Templars survived by going deep underground.

It was determined by the surviving group that they would communicate and meet only every 200 years or so. So some members of this group would do nothing in their lives but wait for 200 years to pass, and recruit others to wait further after they pass away, and so on. These messages would be scrawled as grafiti on the sides of cathedrals and the like, in encryption, for the others who knew what the messages meant, to read.

As you know, there was a shift in the Gregorian calendar circa 1500’s, to correct the margin of error of the revolution of the Earth. On some calendars, up to 11 days were erased. This caused a rift in the Templars’ schedule because the next meeting was to take place during this missing time on the calendar. After waiting 200 years, the ones in France missed the ones from England by a week because of the difference in the dates. It was fascinating. The modern day main group of characters are investigating what happened afterward, if the Templars ever connected back again. The book even talks about the Pyramids.

So this seems to fit in the premise that was mentioned in the OP because:

  1. It involves a shift in time.
  2. People waiting long periods of time.
  3. Secret messages that are supposed to last generations.

I believe that a feeble movie based on the book was made in the 80s, but it was made in England.

[digression]
My brother is my main source of recommendations on books that I read. He told me that Umberto Eco also wrote “The Name Of The Rose”. Another author was so impressed, cannot remember their name, that they wrote another book that was based loosely off of “Rose”. As a compliment back, Umberto wrote “Focault’s” as a take off of this other author’s book.
[/digression]

The plot of the OP also reminds me of two movies:

  1. Stargate
  2. 12 Monkeys

But it seems like a good plot, and should be published.

9

If they’re “effectively immortal,” why would they need to bother sending a message? They could just wait for their intended audience to be born and then tell them.

10

There’s a big difference between living for, say, 500 years (long enough to oversee the Pyramids), and living for 10,000 years (to deliver the message in person). If nothing else, that’s that much more time for death by misadventure.