A go-to-sleep story I play in my head. It would have been a book if I had kept up with my writing. Since I now use it as my fantasy sleep device, it is in first person.
I’m researching pre-historic Manhattan island at the main branch of the NY Public Library, spending a lot of time in this one room in the basement that has one small basement window high up on the wall. I begin to notice that the scene out the window sometimes does not match what is going on outside. Out of curiosity one summer day, I climb up to investigate what looks like a snowy landscape. I climb out the window and. . . I was in the middle of a tall hill. I could smell the ocean but I could see it.
I use my knowledge to figure out, then survive, then build a whole civilization. There are rules about this time travel thingie (all of them pretty much all good for me) like, I will die but only when I would have naturally died, so I’m pretty much immortal. Even if I do die, I just end up back where the window should be. I eventually realize I can climb back into the window but only into the room with all the reference books. I spend thousands of years alone, building myself a whole new world from scratch.
My imaginings get somewhat complex and there are definitely stages.
Alone time. First contact with other humans. My time as a tribal leader, then a God (because I know everything and I don’t die), contact with the other continent. . …
Every now and again I think about writing this but the only fiction I’ve ever written were a handful of romance novels and writing even those simple things was a slog.
So I had the idea for a time travel based on the classic sci-fi short story The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass. A time traveler goes back to 1st century Rome with a medical textbook in the hope of improving humanity’s future.
But rather than ushering in apocalyptic population growth as in the original (as none of the causes of mortality are really solved by knowing about them, plus the textbook has a chapter on birth control) it actually goes South in different way. The result is an understanding of human biology far in advance of any other aspect of science in the classical and medieval period but without any of the other cultural changes that came with the IRL scientific revolution.
So inevitably the emperors, kings and warlords of that era find a way to apply this knowledge of biology to warfare, and invent sophisticated biological warfare long before even gunpowder. Which makes quite a dystopian society for our eponymous hero to deal with.
Yours is probably better suited to a longer running story or novel. Again, I had always envisioned mine as a Twilight Zone (1 hour) or Outer Limits one or two parter, or as a graphic novel. A better writer, or good actors could make it a feature length movie.
But I’m quite positive I lack the ability to write the dialog to make it work, one of my greatest weaknesses despite being an otherwise fine member of the English Majors who will never find work with their degree species.
I’ve enjoyed reading every post so far in this thread. However, can I ask if anyone can give me some feedback on my Band Of Busters idea that I described in my OP? Comments, critiques, ideas, questions, anything.
The only methods I am aware of that would allow objects to travel to locations in the past are methods that entail travelling faster than light, either via a wormhole or via other forms of space-time distortion. There is no question of ‘popping into existence’ anywhere, although to an outside observer it might look that way.
Perhaps this is a Terminator-type scenario; the Band of Busters are there to stop Disney taking over the world, so they sabotage Bambi or something. I’d say start with Pinocchio but of course the USA didn’t enter the war in 1939.
IIRC, in the comics they did a plot where people arrived from the future during WWII but not, as far as anyone could tell, to alter the overall course of the war; they weren’t, like, trying to get to Hitler — or, for that matter, Roosevelt — but, here, let me show you that torn scrap of paper, Green Lantern: some guy named ‘Carter,’ some guy named ‘Ford,’ some guy named ‘Nixon’…
Time travel to the past? That’s still as elusive as finding a unicorn in your back yard. Sure, we’ve got some fancy solutions in general relativity, like wormholes and closed timelike curves, that could theoretically open the door to backward time travel. But here’s the catch—they require some truly exotic conditions that make them about as likely as winning the lottery while riding your unicorn. Right now, and for the foreseeable future (which is easier to travel to), practical time travel to the past is not even a blip on the radar.
Now, if we entertain the idea of a multiverse—think parallel universes with alternate histories—there might be a universe out there with a history you prefer. Then, it’s simply a matter of finding that universe and traveling into it. “Pseudo time travel”—easy peasy!
One that I actually wrote and published, The Traveler. I based it on a premise that I’ve had in mind for a long time – that if I traveled somewhere in my time machine, I’d always be worried that it would break down and I couldn’t get back to my own time. I would think that would be the main worry of a lot of time travelers.
Of course, if you have a time machine, other people probably do, as well, so you’d be in the position of someone in the early days of airplane travel – your plane might go down, but if you told people where you were going, they could send somebody after you. In fact, it’s better than that, because they could learn about your plight long after it was first made known, and still go back to when you were lost and get you. So there’s no peril at all, right?
But what if that weren’t the case? I took the idea that my hero couldn’t count on someone coming to get him, and that he had to rely on his own ingenuity to get out of his jam. He’d traveled back to Imperial Rome, which had some technology, but not enough to make anything easy. He could cannibalize parts of his time machine to get the essential portion working, but he’d still have to build lots of things himself. He’d be like Martin Padway in L. Sprague de Camp’s classic Lest Darkness Fall or Hank Morgan in Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’a Court, or – most similar – like Myles Cabot in Ralph Milne Farley’s The Radio Man (a Planetary Romance rather than a Time Travel story), who had to build a radio transmitter and receiver from scratch. I took the view that travel to the past was difficult and gettig right where you wanted to go was hard, and that it was easier to travel back to a time tat was exactly the same difference in time as your previous trip. I wanted to avoid time loops and rescuers ffrom the future. I was pretty happy with the result. I still dealt with the effects of changing the past, but too the view that most attempts to do so would have no noticeable effect – inventions introduced “before their time” would probably be lost and forgotten. You’d have to do something pretty spectacular to make a noticeable ripple in the time stream.
I had an idea years ago after watching Star Trek - The City on the Edge of Forever. When it got to the Guardian of Forever scene a story started forming.
Rather than go back to the past and rather watch it Godlike through the Guardian and it shows Earths history.
The person somehow gets a time machine, goes back and makes a change such as preventing the Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand then immediately returns to the future. He/she goes to a library and reads the papers or watches documentaries on the history of the world since the failed assassination. Seems like an interesting idea to me, but I don’t think it’d make a compelling story. The best idea I could come up with would be something like My Dinner with Andre where the protagonist meets with a historian who explains everything that has happened since the intervention.
You just reminded me of a story idea I had once. Someone gets the idea to ask the GoF to show them the meta-history of the galaxy: the history of how time has been successively altered to arrive at the here-now of the person asking the question. It turns out to be a very tangled path…
