What are some of YOUR greatest Time Travel Stories/Ideas that YOU yourself came up with?

Cafe Society
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I’ve had several ideas for stories/settings that I think would be cool.

-More a setting/premise than a fleshed out story, but… a time travel tourism company for psychopaths which takes people back in time to places that are about to be totally wiped out by horrible disasters, because if you’re on the island of Krakatoa 24 hours before it erupts, and are a psychopath, you can go around killing and abusing anyone you want as much as you want with zero risk of altering history, as they’re all going to die anyhow

-The year is 1940, in Nazi-occupied France. A small group of French Resistance fighters have received some precious information about the upcoming travel itinerary of a top Nazi. They set up an ambush for him. Sure enough, there he is, it’s all about to work… when suddenly a mysterious figure pops up out of nowhere and interferes with the assassination. The Nazi gets away. The French Resistance people capture the mysterious person, determined to figure out how their plan leaked… turns out he’s a time traveler from a future in which the Nazis fought the Allies to a standstill, leading to generations of misery. And he traveled back in time to save the life of… Herman Goering, who was such an incompetent lout that future historians calculated that had he lived, his being alive and in charge of the Luftwaffe would single-handedly tip the balance enough for the Allies to win

-Our story opens in a small but idealistic society of pioneers who are living in 5000 BC or so, having been sent back from the future where a horrible disaster was overtaking all of humanity. This small society’s mission is to use their knowledge from the future to rebuild a better world. (Pretty standard setup). And as you would expect, they are able to expand rapidly and start up the tech tree due to the knowledge they were sent with. However, they were send back not only with technical knowledge but also ethical instructions on how society should be organized, how they should interact with the people of the time, etc. And we (as the readers) start to get suspicious of what’s going on. Eventually we realize that they were not (as we had initially assumed) sent back by the UN from a world dying due to climate change… rather they were sent back from 1945 Berlin, and their blueprint for a perfect society is based on Nazi racial ideology. (I envision some plot in which a young person from this society is in danger, is rescued by a group of “primitives”, and falls in love with one of them, leading to a questioning of beliefs, yada yada yada).

-Not strictly time travel, but parallel universes: So due to some handwaving mumbo jumbo about quantum entanglement and the twin slit experiment, turns out that you can build a machine which, if you take to a physical location on earth and turn it on, has a very small chance of making contact with someone on a parallel universe who happens to be in precisely the same physical location at precisely the same time with a similar machine. Sometimes you’ll connect to a universe that is nearly identical to ours… diverged from our timeline just a week ago. Sometimes, much further in the past. And establishing one of these connections can be hugely profitable. For instance, say you contact a universe which diverged 100 years ago. You can’t go there and they can’t come here, but you can communicate. And you can trade them several gigabytes containing every Pixar movie for the equivalent entertainment from their universe, which you can then sell. (Also of course swap historical details and so forth, which academics will pay for… but not as much as people will pay for pop culture). Lots of interesting implications of this… one being how to figure out where to stand to “make contact”. There’s a bit of a gold-rush metal-detector aspect to it with fortune seekers wandering around the globe trying to theorize places where people would go if they didn’t share our cultural viewpoint. So places like the northernmost points on continents, intersections of rivers, etc. Places that are clearly “special” purely from a geographic standpoint. Another implication of this would be the ability for people who had lost loved ones to potentially talk to those loved ones, or their versions in other universes where they didn’t happen to die in that car accident. And if these connections could be maintained, then there would be interesting implications like Disney can’t decide which of 4 movies to make. So they find two split points from super-recently so that they are chatting between four universes, make one of the movies in each universe, and then share them all around when they’re done. Presto, 4 full length movies produced for the price of one. But then actors who weren’t cast in this universe’s movies start to file lawsuits…

-Finally, I’d love to a read a very very well thought out hard-ish sci fi series about the fairly-common premise of “let’s go back in time to conquer the roman empire and fix everything it did wrong”… except that the entire first book in the series is just the preparation and planning. What levels of tech do you aim for? How quickly will you be able to set up oil refinery technology once you’re there? How do you plan on making contact with the Roman Empire? Which precise era of the empire do you visit? etc.

62

I’ve had similar thoughts about a time traveler determined to prevent Joseph Stalin from “hijacking” the Revolution and allowing “true” communism to take place. It turns out that horrifying as Stalin’s Soviet Union was, it was positively tame compared to what would have happened if Trotsky had succeeded Lenin.

I am absolutely convinced that “Chicken Run” is the animated claymation parody of a Oscar-winning movie from an alternate timeline in which Britain was occupied by the Third Reich before being liberated by the Americans.

63

Others have probably had similar ideas- I don’t feel like reading though the whole thread right now, but I had an idea for a time travel story in which time travel is invented, and it’s determined that the time travel ‘Grandfather paradox’ is avoided because the instant a person is sent back in time it splits off an alternate universe. So if you kill your Grandpa, it only stops the future ‘you’ in the new timeline from being born; the ‘you’ from the original timeline is born, so the ‘you’ that kills your Grandpa continues to exist.

A lucrative business is formed in which people spend big money to travel back in time to do anything they want. Since new timelines are being formed, no one is concerned in the present about changing anything. Want to go back and hunt dinosaurs with AK-47s and rocket launchers? Go crazy! No worrying about killing any dinos before their time, or stepping on butterflies. Want to go back to Medieval times and do a ‘Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’ thing? Have fun! Hope you don’t get burned at the stake as a witch! The drawback is that once you go back, you can never return to the original timeline. You can travel back to present day, but only in the new timeline.

Some half-formed ideas to pursue in this scenario would be the ethics of doing such a thing-- even if it’s not altering the current timeline, it’s still subjecting alt-uni people to possible suffering, if someone wanted to go back and out-Hitler Hitler, for example. Exploring some of the unexpected outcomes of the people who travel back-- like the aforementioned getting burned as a witch because you bring back magical-seeming tech. Oops! And of course, some sort of Twilight Zone-style twist that happens to the original timeline in which the lucrative time travel agency thing is happening.

64

Marvel Comics has something similar. Doctor Doom invented a time machine but since you can’t contradict your own past, when you return to your present none of the changes you made happened.

65

I always liked the concept behind Kage Baker’s “The Company” series.

Okay, you can’t “change the past”, but what does that mean? The vast majority of the past is completely unknown to us, so who knows what really happened on any given day?

One example from that series: We know the Library at Alexandria was burned. We can’t change that. But do we know what some junior librarians were doing in the years leading up to that? Send an agent in with a concealed photocopier, and just make copies of everything that you know is going to be lost.

So the broad sweep of history moves on exactly as we expect, but in the little details, we can still pull a lot of capers.

66

I’ve heard it suggested that in Doctor Who, one reason why the Time Lords originally were so miffed with the Doctor intervening in history was that any time a Time Lord takes an action in the universe, that series of events becomes time-locked forever, limiting the scope for any further alteration of history by the Time Lords. Later they unbent when they saw that the Doctor almost entirely did exactly the interventions they’d want to happen anyway.

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Goering is something of an enigmatic figure, but the issues with how the Germans ran the war was more institutional than anything else, tho certainly a lot of what Hitler himself dictated had a big effect. In terms of how the Luftwaffe was run it’s kind of hard to see how ditching Fatty would have made a huge difference. Hitler for example ordered research into jets to be greatly reduced after the Battle for France was won. Maybe some of these early decisions, also including not pursuing heavy bombers or dedicated maritime patrol/attack craft, could have gone otherwise without him, but there were production constraints which made expanding the early Luftwaffe problematic. By the time the tide turned he was pretty much cut out of most major decision making, where people like Speer had a lot more say-so.

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Not sure if this qualifies or has been mentioned

A few weeks after TNGs “Yesterdays Enterprise” I realized they could use it to bring back Tasha Yar. They used the circumstances to bring in her daughter.

Immediately after the First Contact movie I knew that they could use it to feature the Borg in Enterprise.