It seems to be a common, if not universal, trope in sci-fi that trying to change the past never really works out - either your attempts to improve the timeline just make things worse, or your attempts to intervene are what winds up causing things to happen the way they did in the first place. In this thread I’m interested in cataloguing the opposite - stories where a time traveller attempts to change the past, and as a result, the future/present is actually better as a result.
Futurama is the first example that comes to mind. When Fry and the gang travel back in time to 194 Roswell, Fry accidentally gets his own grandpa killed in a nuclear test, then sleeps with his grandma and conceives his own father. As a result, when the Brainspawn invade Earth in a future episode, he alone is immune, because the unique DNA makeup he has a result of being his own grandfather renders him immune to their hypontic powers.
I don’t recall the author, but I read a short story around 2000 or so about an agency that intervenes in parallel universes which are identical to ours but where it’s currently an earlier year, by abducting influential people from the timeline and imprisoning them in their own. They had kidnapped Hitler from another timeline in its early 1920s, and at the time the story is set it’s the mid ‘30s in that timeline and things are going well - Hindenburg has died and been succeeded by a moderate PM and there are no indications that Germany is tending towards fascism.
The Terminator franchise could arguably apply. In the ur-timeline of the first movie, it’s implied that John Connor’s resistance is losing the war in the future. As a result of Kyle Reese becoming John’s father and Sarah knowing about his future, he grows up knowing the destiny that’s in store for him and is better equipped to lead the resistance as a result - and though the subsequent sequels show that the rise of Skynet is never permanently prevented, it keeps getting shifted further and further into the future.
Interested to see what other examples folks can come up with.
I quite enjoyed John Brunner’s Times Without Number. It’s main timeline is one in which Spain conquers England in 1588. That’s not the “time travel works out” bit. I don’t want to spoil the ending.
The original Back to the Future has everything work out. Marty’s family are all much better off, richer with better educations and better jobs. And the bad guy Biff is doing menial jobs for their family, rather than still bullying his dad every day.
In Lightning by Dean Koontz the time travelers are Nazis from the past, trying to steal modern technology to win WWII. At the end of the story the project is destroyed, due to future knowledge of the Cold War being leaked the USSR is overthrown, and a paralyzed character can walk in the new timeline.
In Einstein’s Bridge by John Cramer time travel is used to change the past so our Earth is not invaded and humanity exterminated by a hive intelligence that colonizes alternate timelines by taking advantage of high-energy experiments to access unprepared worlds.
In the Belisarius series by Eric Flint and David Drake, an attempt by an extremely nasty faction in the far future to reshape human history in their image is derailed with the aid of an opposing faction.
In Andre Norton’s Time Traders series, the protagonists are generally successful against both their competing Soviet time travelers, and the hostile aliens that have been intervening on Earth in the distant past (and apparently no longer exist in the present).
How do we count it if one time traveler is attempting to change history in some grand way, but another time traveler stops them? Does it depend on which one is the protagonist?
The Paradox Men seems like it’s going to be a ‘happen they way they did in the first place’ story, but the twist ending is that, nope, everything is better as a result.
“Delenda Est”, part of the Time Patrol series by Poul Anderson, has two major changes. A Time Patrol agent on vacation in the Pleistocene attempts to return home to 20th-century NYC, but the world is unrecognisable – amongst other changes, Lithuania and Brazil are major powers. A history book is given to him and he discovers that the world went awry – from his point of view – with a Carthaginian victory in the Second Punic War (late third century BCE). Investigation shows that criminals from the far future had killed Scipio (not yet “Africanus” early in the war. So the next step is to stop the criminals before they kill Scipio…
There is the Pern series by Anne McCaffrey, starting with Dragonflight where the heroine Lessa teleports through time with her dragon to bring back dragonriders from the past to fight the Threads (silver, mindless spores from a nearby planet that rains down and devours all organic matter on contact.)
Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity. A secret organization of time travelers continually interfere with humanity over thousands of millennia with the goal of maximizing human happiness. They unknowingly doom the human race to extinction by preventing the development on interstellar travel. An alternate organization of time travelers from the far future go back to prevent the creation of the first group, thus allowing humanity to develop interstellar travel and spread throughout the galaxy. Retconned into Foundation’s Edge as the event that allowed the Galactic Empire.
The subject line says books, but the OP includes movies, so I guess they are okay…
In the 2007 Japanese movie Bubble Fiction (simplifying the story a bit) someone goes from the then-present to 1990 to try to prevent the Japanese economic bubble from bursting. They return to the future and in the closing credits are seen driving across Tokyo’s Rainbow Bridge. In real life, it looks like this:
In the unburst revised timeline, they have needed to expand it a bit:
If I recall, this book was one of my early introductions to the concept of alternate history. Seeing the changes in the lives of historical people was interesting.
