There’s a very low budget movie called Future '38 which claims to be a recently rediscovered classic from 1938. Some scientists have recognized Hitler’s ambitions, and have invented a weapon which is so powerful that it it will dissuade him from launching any attacks. There’s one problem; the weapon relies on the rare Formica atom, which becomes more powerful over time, and will require 80 years to be potent enough. They lock the atom in a vault and sent intrepid hero Jack Essex 80 years into the future to unlock the vault, collect the atom, and return. If he fails, World War II will take place. He has 12 hours.
Unfortunately, by 2018 the building with the vault has become the German consulate. Essex arrives on the same evening that Adolf’s son, Lamont Hitler is hosting a reception, and eager to stop Essex’s mission which led to decades of German weakness and humiliation.
All of which is really just a backdrop for a fish-out-of-water comedy of how the past got some things right about the future, and some things hilariously wrong.
Was there a story, or did I dream it, about a time machine used as punishment like prison? A person gets sentenced to 5 years, then put in a time machine and they come out 5 years older seconds later.
Are you thinking of “The House of If” by Barry Longyear, or perhaps the Star Trek DS9 episode “Hard Time” S4 E19, in which O’Brien was sentenced to such a prison term? In both stories, the prison time was served in a mental simulation run at a high time compression factor rather than a time machine, but the effect was similar.
Sounds a bit like (the opposite of) Stephen King’s “The Jaunt”, but this story is not about an intentional punishment but rather a terrible unintended side-effect of teleportation technology.
Not a book, but the TV show Travellers is about this, from the point of view of the time travellers trying to fix things. Thousands of travellers are sent back to try to prevent the complete global environmental collapse that has wiped out most of the biosphere, and despite mostly succeeding in their individual missions, things in the future just keep getting worse. They eventually trigger a full-scale nuclear war years earlier than was “supposed” to happen in their original timeline. One of the current-day people who knows what they’re doing actually calls them out on it, saying all they did was make thing worse.
Eventually the entity in charge of it all executes a complete wipe of the program, with the implication that it will try again with a new strategy, setting up a possible reboot series.
No, but I did recognize the actor from an episode of Law & Order. As I said, very low budget, but there are a few familiar faces. Ethan Phillips and Sean Young have small roles, and there’s an intro by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
He also made a novel called The Proteus Operation that is about time travel and changing the past but they realize they are just going into alternate timelines and they can’t change anything.
As I recall, Padway actually falls through a time warp (no time machine in that book) to a period somewhat after the fall of the West Roman Empire. The Ostrogoths are ruling Italy when he gets there, which is in the 6th century IIRC. So no saving the Roman Empire.
A portion of The Last Temptation of Christ has Jesus making choices that lead to him living an “ordinary” life, getting married and having sex and having children, and finally growing old. It’s not a time travel machine per se, but an alternate look at a different timeline.
“Germans winning WW2” I think. Saving JFK is niche, Lincoln almost as much and killing Hitler doesn’t have as much story potential as the Nazis winning does. Especially given the modern fetish for dystopias.