# What Historical Figure Would You Bring Forward In Time? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [October 2, 2010, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-historical-figure-would-you-bring-forward-in-time/555848 "2010-10-02T16:42:29Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2010, 5:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-historical-figure-would-you-bring-forward-in-time/555848/61 "2010-10-10T17:59:18Z")
It would also be interesting to get Orwell’s take on the Sexual Revolution and the Feminist Revolution; his attitude in such matters was never puritanical, but still rather old-fashioned. ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2010, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-historical-figure-would-you-bring-forward-in-time/555848/62 "2010-10-10T18:39:34Z")
Remember the movie _Time After Time_? H G Wells had pictured the future as a utopia, and was horrified when Jack the Ripper used his time machine to go in 1970’s San Francisco. He followed him to prevent his actions. As Jack himself told Wells "Back then I was a freak. Here, I’m an amateur! It would be interesting to get Wells’s take on modern society. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2010, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-historical-figure-would-you-bring-forward-in-time/555848/63 "2010-10-10T19:14:15Z")
> [@Annie-Xmas](#): > > Remember the movie _Time After Time_? H G Wells had pictured the future as a utopia, and was horrified when Jack the Ripper used his time machine to go in 1970’s San Francisco. He followed him to prevent his actions. As Jack himself told Wells "Back then I was a freak. Here, I’m an amateur! > > It would be interesting to get Wells’s take on modern society. Wells was deeply disappointed, to the point of denial, with the course history took **during his lifetime.** Read [“Wells, Hitler, and the World State,”](http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part15) by George Orwell (1941). > [@](#): > > But because he belonged to the nineteenth century and to a non-military nation and class, he could not grasp the tremendous strength of the old world which was symbolised in his mind by fox-hunting Tories. He was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity. Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them. The people who have shown the best understanding of Fascism are either those who have suffered under it or those who have a Fascist streak in themselves. A crude book like THE IRON HEEL, written nearly thirty years ago, is a truer prophecy of the future than either BRAVE NEW WORLD or THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME. If one had to choose among Wells’s own contemporaries a writer who could stand towards him as a corrective, one might choose Kipling, who was not deaf to the evil voices of power and military “glory”. Kipling would have understood the appeal of Hitler, or for that matter of Stalin, whatever his attitude towards them might be. Wells is too sane to understand the modern world. The succession of lower-middle-class novels which are his greatest achievement stopped short at the other war and never really began again, and since 1920 he has squandered his talents in slaying paper dragons. But how much it is, after all, to have any talents to squander. ---
**Author:** ![CatherineMcClarey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/dc4da7/32.png) [@CatherineMcClarey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CatherineMcClarey)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2010, 11:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-historical-figure-would-you-bring-forward-in-time/555848/64 "2010-10-10T23:58:21Z")
I’d love to have tea with a few feisty ladies from the past – say, Abigail Adams, Isabel I of Castilla, and Queen Kristina of Sweden (daughter of Gustavus Adolphus), for starters. ---
**Author:** ![ZPG\_Zealot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/e47c2d/32.png) [@ZPG\_Zealot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZPG_Zealot)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2010, 2:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-historical-figure-would-you-bring-forward-in-time/555848/65 "2010-10-11T02:00:06Z")
> [@zamboniracer](#): > > I’d bring forward Jesus and Mohammad, and have them explain themselves, because both the Gospels and the Koran tend to be murky in places. Ditto. I think if the Jesus recorded in the christian bible aid and did the things attributed to him, it would be relatively easy to get him to come forward our time. “Rabbi, there are more money changers to drive out of the temple,” would probably be a good openning line. Mohammad has a much more war like personality, but I suspect he would not be pleased about suicide bombers. I think both of them would want to try straightening out the damage their followers have done. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-historical-figure-would-you-bring-forward-in-time/555848.md?page=3)