I’d like some input on SciFi stories dealing with time travel going wrong. I remember the Twilight Zone story about the old rich guy who sells his soul to go back to the town of his youth-and every scheme he had goes wrong.
Time travel stories usually inculde the proviso that you can’t really change things-otherwise all hell breaks loose. Can you recommend some modern SciFi stories of the genre?
There are plenty of them. L. Sprague de Camp wrote Aristotle and the Gun, about a Brookhaven physicist who tries to get the ancient Greek philosopher onto a more scientific track and ends up changing history significantly, going back to his own time to find the American Indians in political control of North America, because the Europeans didn’t start explorations until much later. (de Camp has written many other time travel stories, with his novel Lest Darkness Fall being an example of the opposite situation, where unintentionally time-travelling Martin Padway ends up preventing the fall of the Roman Empire.)
Ray Bradbury’s a Sound of Thunder shows how an apparently inconsequential act in the past changes our present (and was the basis for a Simpson “Treehouse of Horror” episode, and a not altogether bad film adaptation by Peter Hyams. deCamp, not liking Bradbury’s time-travelling dinosaur hunt story, wrote his own in A Gun for Dinosaur, in which there are no bad present-day repercussions)
Stories of people trying to change wars in the past to their advantage abound. There’s Harry Turtledove’s [b} Guns of the South** (Give the South Uzis and see what happens) and Hogan’s The Proteus Project (Opposing Groups try to sway the outcome of WWII. I’ve seen other examples in TV shows and comics.
Robert Silverberg’s Up the Line has a time-travelling tour guide trying to prevent family tragedy caused by his charges in ancient Byzantium.
Honestly, I have a much harder time thinking of time-travel stories where things DON’T go horribly wrong for whoever it is that went back in time.
I remember one from Epic Illustrated where a fella goes back to the Stone Age and drops his lighter. He later sees primitive man waving torches around and thinks, “Huh, man had fire way earlier than anyone thought. Wait’ll I get back and tell everyone.”
Then he goes back to his own time, and it’s just a desolate wasteland of cracked earth. Accidentally giving man fire that early meant quicker development of civilization, and weapons, and global nuclear war happened hundreds of years before the traveler’s own time. Oops.
QFT.
There’s a whole sub-genre of going back in time and the Nazis win WWII and are still running rampant in the streets screaming for “your papers.”
Try Primer for a bit of a different take on the genre. It’s an ultra-low budget independent movie from a few years ago that takes what seems to be a fairly realistic look at what would happen if a couple of hobbyist engineers discovered (limited) time travel…
I’ll second this recommendation, with the proviso that you watch it at least two times.
Robert Heinlein’s* Farnham’s Freehold* has a small bit of time travel in it that works out OK for the traveller. The catastrophic events were going to happen anyway, but the time travel allowed the protagonist a small advantage in his chance of survival.
Millenium by John Varley
Thanks-as i said, I remember the old Twilight Zone episode-the rich old guy yearns for the town of his youth-all his memories of the place are grteat-till he gets there.
Then, he realizes what a fool he was-there’s no running water, disease is rampant, the food sucks, and the local doctor is an idiot. He learns that he can get back to his own time-but there is a catch (he winds up a poor janitor).
People, people! Have we already forgotten about The City on the Edge of Forever?
Alfred Bester’s “The Men Who Murdered Muhammad,” where the time travel goes wrong in a different way than any other time travel story.
James Tiptree, Jr.s’ “Forever to a Hudson’s Bay Blanket.” Again the time travel goes wrong in an unexpected way (and asks the question when it happens, “Who can you complain to?”). Tiptree later wrote “Backward Turn Backward” using the same method of time travel, also to disastrous results.
Larry Niven’s “Singularities Make Me Nervous” and “Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation”. Also the Svetz stories, collected in The Flight of the Horse and Rainbow Mars.
I keep traveling into the future, and things keep going wrong all around me. I dunno.
There’s also “The Man Who Walked Home”.
Somehow I managed to completely misread the OP. My bad.
David Gerrold’s excellent The Man Who Folded Himself (although I’m upset at the re-writing that occurred for the ebook edition, it’s still a terrific story). Not so much “time travel gone wrong” as “time travel not exactly what was expected”.