In most stories that involve time travel to the past, changing the past almost always causes detrimental effects on the present, either accidentally through the so-called "Butterfly Effect, or on purpose via “The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions” effect. Going way back in time and kicking a pebble causes vampire Nazi T-Rexes to rule the Earth. Stopping Lincoln’s assassination causes resentment to build and Civil War II starts up five years later. Killing Hitler as a baby and either Russia or China take over the world, etc.
Are there any stories or movies out there that defy the “This is the best of all possible worlds, so don’t fuck with it!” trope and tell a tale of meddling(either accidentally or on purpose) gone right?
I’d say the McFly family was better off after Marty tweaked stuff in the first Back to the Future. Of course, from Biff’s perspective things were worse.
Well, the McFly family in the new timeline. Meanwhile, the family in the original timeline is desperately searching for Marty who was presumably kidnapped by the Libyans who killed Doc Brown, while terrorized by Biff Tannen. And in the Biff-Becomes-Casino-Magnate timeline, well…I think that is actually our world.
Seriously, Dirk Gently’s Detective Agency (the novel, not the shows), while preventing stopping the accident that causes abiogenesis of life on Earth, did give us Bach even if it prevented Coleridge from completing the “…second, and altogether stranger, part of the poem…”
Stranger
The first thing that comes to mind is a Japanese movie called Bubble Fiction. A young woman traveling back in time in search of her father causes Japan to never have a bubble economy collapse. She gets back…to the future in the end and in the final moments as the camera pulls back you see two new copies of the Yokohama Bay Bridge that had to be built to accommodate the extra traffic from the still booming economy (as Frankie Vallie sings Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You plays for the end credits.)
And here’s the trope:
Two TV ones I thought of (before seeing that they do indeed have Tv Trope entries) The SG1 episode 2010
And the whole series 7 Days
One sci-fi novel that apparently didn’t make the list: THE PARADOX MEN (which, admittedly, cheats by dint of being set on the eve of all-out nuclear war — which makes it pretty easy to have a protagonist want to go back in time and change history).
The Conrad Stargard series of science fiction novels by Leo Frankowski have the protagonist travel back to 13th century Poland and saving it from the Mongol invasions, jump starting an Industrial Revolution and leading to a significantly more advanced civilization by the “present”.
Let’s see, of course there is the Dragonriders of Pern, where if they hadn’t done time-travel, it’s arguable that life on Pern would have ended. But that one is a predestination paradox, so YMMV.
Heinlein’s extended Number of the Beast / Time Enough of Love / Sail Beyond the Sunset uses time-travel pretty cavalierly with minimal consequences.
I’m off to eat some food, or I’d look at my shelves / DVDs for more.
Would Quantum Leap count? Every time Sam jumps, he makes things better.
There’s Odyssey 5, where a group of astronauts watch as the Earth is destroyed beneath them. Then they are transported back a few years to try to prevent it.
They did play the butterfly effect a bit, where one of the characters bets big on a football game, but the players learn about the bet, making the kicker nervous and missing the winning field goal, changing the outcome. (IIRC)
Most of the characters also had an arc trying to improve their own timeline.
It was cancelled after its first season, so we don’t know if they succeeded, but they were trying to make a better future. (Or, at least one where the Earth doesn’t blow up, which one could argue is better.)
I only present it as an example, not as a good show. (It was a good idea though, just poorly executed, IMHO.)
When you say “accidentally or on purpose,” does that mean that you’re looking for both stories where someone’s actions in the past have inadvertant and unintended positive effects in the present/future and stories where someone goes back in time deliberately to fix or improve present/future conditions and unqualifiedly succeeds?
Back To The Future (mentioned in the first reply) is probably the best-known example of the former. The latter is probably more common—I think Star Trek IV qualifies.
One of my favorite books is To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis. It has some very different time travel mechanics. I’d say it subverts the all interference is bad trope.
The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror 5, has a segment called “Time and Punishment,” where Homer turns a toaster into a time machine and proceeds to mess up the universe in myriad ways, tries to fix things and finally just gives up when he thinks he’s close enough.
Mechanics that don’t actually involve altering anything in the past or the future at all because you already changed the past (the same as Doomsday Book and a couple of short stories).
When he’s close enough.
He would have ended up staying in the perfect timeline if he’d waited for the doughnuts to start falling.
Heinlein’s “The Door into Summer”. The title alludes to traveling to the past to fix wrongs and make things better. And the protagonist does just that, and lives happily ever after.
Fritz Lieber’s “Try to Change the Past” and Alfred Bester’s “The Men Who Murdered Muhammad” the time travel makes no difference.
11/22/63 by Stephen King examines this topic, albeit in somewhat of a roundabout way.
Plus it’s a great read.