A while back there was a meme going around of time travelers going back and killing Hitler. Others would have to go back to reset the timeline because things got much worse. Are there other stories or novels that touch on this theme?
I recall a time travel story where someone killed a German leader because he would have instituted an economic policy that extended the Depression, and it’s not like a different leader could have done anything worse. Who’s this Hitler guy, anyway?
I recall another where in order to prevent WWII and the rise of Hitler, time travelers manipulated events so Germany won WWI…and at the end of the story realize that all they did was ensure the rise of a French equivalent of Hitler.
James P. Hogan wrote a short story where a time travelers goes back to kill Hitler, and is promptly detained by German security who are very confused why all these weird people from the future showed up to kill such an enlightened leader. Then when he does kill Hitler and is shot in return, the last thing he sees is the Germans talking about how “they’ll have to use the double”, even if he is unstable…
Another Hitler variation
In the video game series Command & Conquer Red Alert, in Red Alert 1 it starts with Albert Einstein in 1949 inventing a time machine and going back in time to 1923 and killing Hitler before he became a name, which leads to the Nazi party eventually disbanding. This overwrites our WW2 timeline but Einstein is fine with this as his reality fades away because he thinks this will end all the bloodshed of the 20th century.
However this just leads to World War 2 just being delayed, with it starting in 1949 when Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union invades Eastern Europe and rolls right across to France wanting a totally Communist Europe and destroying everything in his wake. Eventually the Western Allies (in this case most of Europe including the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Greece) with the help of new allies including the United States push back the Soviets though the Soviets practice scorched earth all the way until the final showdown in Moscow where Stalin is killed. The war winds up being much more destructive than our WW2 with over 100 million killed in Europe alone.
Of course the further games make the world even worse, in Red Alert 2 with Stalin dead the Allies put a puppet Communist government in charge of Russia lead by a surviving Romanov. However he’s actually sympathetic to the former Communist government and eventually rebuilds the Soviet military and invaded the United States itself in the 1970s blaming them for its loss in WW2 and this World War 3 also leads to heavy death and destruction until the Soviets again are defeated by the Allies quickly sieging and destroying Moscow via this world’s Albert Einstein developing teleportation technology.
Then Red Alert 3 comes around, taking place at the end of WW3 in 1976, the Soviets in a last gasp invent a time machine to kill Albert Einstein himself blaming him for inventing nuclear weapons and the teleportation technology. So they kill Einstein in the 1920s too, come back and find themselves winning World War 3 since the Allies lack the teleportation technology to go directly to the Soviet capital and have to fight the much harder way which can’t fight the Soviet Unions sheer numbers. Of course then no nukes means nobody nuked the Japanese in WW2, so a reborn Japanese Empire decides to attack the Soviets Eastern flank when they’re occupied with Europe which now just extends their version of World War 3 further.
So in short summary, Einstein using a time machine to kill Hitler leads to a much worse World War 2 and eventually even a World War 3.
While I don’t think it’s one of his best works, Neal Stephenson’s The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. qualifies. It’s about the creation of a time travel technique designed to give the USA a subtle advantage via changed history but those involved have a different agenda. (simplified for spoilers).
Making History, by Stephen Fry, does a variant with the protagonist and his helper able to send objects back in time, so they choose to put a male contraceptive in the Hitler family’s drinking water before Adolf’s conception. This does not go according to their plans, since the role Hitler played in our timeline gets filled by a smarter, more rational, more controlled charismatic sociopath.
You probably mean this:
Alao, Stephen King’s 11/22/63 probably counts as an example.
My own story, “Saving Hitler” in Space and Time magazine, has someone going back to keep Hitler from being killed in WWI.
Fritz Leiber’s “Try and Change the Past,” and Alfred Bester’s “The Men Who Murdered Muhammed,” both show that you can’t achieve your time travel objectives.
Honestly, if you look at the actual history of attempts on Hitler’s life and how they all managed to just barely fail through shear happenstance, it almost looks like we do actually live in the timeline where a bunch of time travelers tried to kill Hitler and a bunch of other time travelers had to stop them.
Back on topic, in the video game City of Heroes, there’s a group called Ouroboros, whose members call themselves Menders, who monitor all time travel and “mend” the timeline themselves whenever it goes wrong. Their definition of “goes wrong” is any of the myriad timelines where Earth loses an upcoming major alien invasion. Often, this ends up meaning helping lesser villain groups, because their efforts against the invaders are crucial to Earth’s eventual victory.
Charles Sheffield’s “Guilt Trip” has a time traveller alter the outcome of WWI (which in his universe, Germany won) to aid in the creation of a Jewish homeland. He succeeds in a manner that does not please him
Oooh, that’s dark.
I’m reminded of a short story, “Aristotle and the Gun” where the protagonist invents a time machine but his project gets cancelled. Angry, he uses the machine to go back in time to meet the title character and push him into a more-modern-science-friendly attitude. It backfires when the protagonist gets taken back to modern times and finds that science ended up less advanced than it had been before, to the point that the tech level of the world is nowhere near where it had been when he left - and of course, meaning there’s no way to undo what he had done.
Isaac Asimov who usually writes stories with positive endings occasionally goes dark - as in “Fair Exchange?” in which an attempt to go back in time to recover a lost Gilbert and Sullivan score causes the death of the time traveller’s wife
I am reminded of Orson Scott Card’s “Pastwatch" in which Columbus’s voyage was discovered by researchers to actually be the result of an intervention by an earlier group to prevent the rise of a world-dominating Mesoamerican empire.
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin is a full-length novel about someone trying to alter the timeline to achieve a utopia, but things don’t go so well. So he goes back again to try to fix things-- and, of course, they just get worse.
This goes on ad nauseum, and the results are probably a meme now, but when Le Guin wrote it in 1970, it was a bit more startling. It was even pretty good when I read it in the late 80s, albeit, I was still a bit ahead of the main character in thinking his idea was not going to turn out well, but I didn’t know how far Le Guin was going to run with it.
A sort of real life example of the process in reverse is my aunt, who was hidden during the Holocaust, and separated from most of her family-- two of her brothers died at Auschwitz. She was very sick from malnutrition, and hospitalized a long time after the war, and permanently disabled from a really bad case of rickets.
But she tells me she would not change a minute of history, if she could, because things eventually worked out for her, and now she loves her life-- she has four healthy children who are great, and several grandchildren, and is still in love with her husband of 53 years.
She says she hopes that doesn’t make her selfish-- but all she really means is it isn’t a good idea to dwell on “what if?”
William Tenn’s story The Brooklyn Project is a humorous story about a time travel experiment gone wrong. Before the project there is concern about changing history, but the project managers dismiss the concerns. A recording device is repeatedly sent into the past, and each time, it does change history and causes increasingly dramatic changes to the present, but no one notices because in their timeline that is how things have always been.
First thing I thought of.
I loved that game, and its City of Villains counterpart.
That’s really touching.
Regarding the OP, I have to wonder if these stories go wrong more often than they go right.
“See,” cried the thing that had been the acting secretary to the executive assistant on public relations. “See, no matter how subtly! Those who billow were wrong: we haven’t changed.” He extended fifteen purple blobs triumphantly. “Nothing has changed!”
This is one I came in to mention. It’s by L. Sprague de Camp, who’s written a lot of time travel stories. His classic novel Lest Darkness Fall is a case of the opposite result – his hero Martin Padway prevents the Fall of the Roman Empire.
Mark Twain’s a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is arguably another example of Things Not Working Out. Although he achieves a number of notable (and sometime hilarious) successes, ultimately his Henry Morgan’s efforts result in Britain falling under interdict by the Catholic Church and the fall of Arthur’s Round Table.
Someone in short story tried to give Issac Newton a digital calculator. Alas the sample calculation he did came up with the value “666”, and Newton instantly accused him of being a demon sent to tempt him.