Cah you change the past?

[cph78]

Many authors have written books based on the idea that some event in the past is different. Robert Harris's Fatherland is the obvious example.  But is it really a viable idea?

I was just wondering what readers thought of the concept.

Chris Hales



Please post in the Book Corner as a reader...discussion of books you're read not written, thanks!  --Betsy/KB Moderator

[Colin Taber]

I really enjoy alternative history tales, but find that often too much effort goes into making the historical twist work instead of the actual plot and characters.

Some interesting series I've read are Day of Infamy by Harry Turtledove and Axis of Time (a trilogy) by John Birmingham which has a time travel element. While I personally find time travel a corny plot device, Birmingham does a good job of it in his series.

[Jen Black]

I don't know why you would want to change the past, if you mean change it as in Anne Boleyn wasn't executed in 1536 but lived on to be 92 when she died in bed with Elizabeth sobbing into a hankie at her side. What would be the point? What kind of change are you thinking of - and I haven't read Fatherland, or the other example. Sorry.

Jen

[Seleya]

I don't know why you would want to change the past, if you mean change it as in Anne Boleyn wasn't executed in 1536 but lived on to be 92 when she died in bed with Elizabeth sobbing into a hankie at her side. What would be the point? What kind of change are you thinking of - and I haven't read Fatherland, or the other example. Sorry.

Jen

To quote your example: what could have happened if Anne Boleyn wasn't executed and remained queen how would this fact have changed all the subsequent history of England? How different would today's England have been ?

If the heir to the English throne hadn't died on the White Ship there would have been no war between King Stephan and Queen Maud, what would have that meant for England? Would it have influenced the perception about the capability of women to be reigning queens?

What if the Nazis won (that's what 'Fatherland' explores)?

What if aliens invaded in the middle of WW2 (Turtledove's Worldwar books)?

What if the Confederacy had won the American Civil War (Turtledove again)?

What if Rome never fell and Christianity didn't rise  (Sophia McDougall 'Romanitas', 'Rome Burning' and 'Savage City')?

And so on and so forth... Ucronies are a genre of speculative literature that I love (in skilled hands, that is), there history is as much a protagonist as the characters and for me half the fun is to spot the minor changes and the realization of the 'hidden' implications of the major ones. 

 

[Harry Shannon]

It's universal to consider "the road not taken" from time to time when looking at ones own life, so alternate history is probably just a way of playing the same game.

[QuantumIguana]

Can we change the past? We won't know until someone builds a time machine. In fiction, there are multiple answers to the question. One is that no, you can't, because it would create a paradox. The famous example is going back and killing your grandfather - apparently time travelers really hate their grandfathers. According to this model, if you killed your grandfather, you wouldn't be born, so you couldn't have gone back in time to kill him, so he would be alive, so you would exist, and so on. This creates an infinite loop. I suppose the loop could be broken at any time, for example, if the time machine blows a fuse.

Another idea is simply yes, you can change the past. You may vanish as a result of the change, or you may continue to exist as an anomaly.

Still another is no, you can't change the past, when you attempt to change the past you instead create an alternate reality. The original reality goes on undisturbed.

Another idea is no, you can't change the past, you're actions are just part of what already happened. Imagine you want to go back in time to prevent yourself from doing X. You go back in time, and in your attempts to prevent X actually cause X to happen.

Another is that yes, you can change the past, but only for minor events, not for major ones. There was a Twilight Zone episode where someone tried to go back in time to prevent the Lincoln assassination. He fails, but when he returns to the present, the doorman at his club is now a member.

It really depends on what works for the story.

[Jen Black]

OK, take a basic premise and then question it, no problem. It might even be fascinating, but all the loops and twists in QuantunIguana's post apply. Maybe there's an imutable law somewhere that says when an event is ready to happen it will happen, no matter how many tries it takes. So if Anne hadn't lost her head when she did, then she might have fallen from her horse the next week or died in childbirth a year later. she'd served her purpose, in a way - she was of the reformed religion, and turned England from Catholicism. She didn't need to do more.

Jen

[QuantumIguana]

I had forgotten about that option, that you can change the past, but that fate will catch up with you. That sounds like the plot of the Final Destination movies.

There is a tendency to see history as inevitable, that it is simply was dominoes falling over leading to an inevitable result. But history could have gone in different directions, and we learn more about history when we explore what might have been. Imagine we could go back in time, and offer modern medical care to Henry VIII and his first wife. Their children live, they never divorce. The protestant reformation never really takes off. Queen Elizabeth I is never born.

Or take the Cuban Missile Crisis. It wasn't inevitable that this would be resolved peacefully. If it had resulted in nuclear war, we might be looking back and asking a silly question about what might have happened if the nuclear war hadn't started. Just because a political situation is a tinder box doesn't mean it has to erupt.

[bordercollielady]

Actually - I think the concept is fascinating..  especially since I loved "11-22-63" by  King which was based on it..   What is really interesting are the side-effects of doing so which you may not have considered.   

[mooshie78]

I see no issue with it.  It can be interesting if well done, and most fiction stories require some suspension of disbelief unless their just real life type of stories about relationships, crime and so on.

[Jen Black]

It is interesting, isn't it? Remember the old jingle about the horseshoe nail and Richard III losing the battle of Bosworth? History is full of what if moments, and though I've often contemplated what might have happened and wonderful opportunities lost, I never really considered being able to change history. Offering modern medical aid to Henry VIII just doesn't sit well with my sense of reality - but there's scope there for a wonderful historical novel about what would have happened if he had produced children with Catherine. I wonder how publishers would market it - as alternative history, fantasy or historical?

Jen

[UnicornEmily]

I love alternate history.  And I'm a geek about time travel.  "What if?" is a fascinating question.

It's an extremely hard genre to write, alternate history, but really fun anyway.  It takes at least research and devotion to detail as historical fiction (and often more if you want to do it really well), because you have to research super-obscure details that no one thinks of, and you have to really think about the feel of the era, inferring from many sources to try to pull together a new idea, rather than being able to take from a source directly.

One of my favorite alternate histories is Ben Bova's Triumph. Basically -- "What if Winston Churchill had had Josef Stalin assassinated right after the end of World War II?"  Try it sometime, if you'd like to get a feel for an interesting, well-researched, yet fairly short alternate history.

[Tony Rabig]

It's a great starting point for a story, it's been around for a while, and it's still got a lot of mileage left in it, as Stephen King's 11/22/63 demonstrates.

Ray Bradbury's short story "A Sound of Thunder" should be familiar to most of the folks on the boards, but if you haven't already you might want to look at Fritz Leiber's classic Change War stories; in the Change War, opposing armies use time travel as a weapon trying to gain advantage by changing past events.  See Leiber's novel The Big Time, and for Leiber's take on how resistant the past is to change (a key story element in King's novel) see his short story "Try and Change the Past."  Terrific stuff.

[The Hooded Claw]

Harry Turtledove makes his living off of megaseries using this concept, as mentioned.

For a nuts and bolts look at a poor sap who goes back to the past and tries to change it, look for Lest Darkness Fall, by L. Sprague de Camp.

[The Hooded Claw]

By the way, the best of the Turtledove series using alternate history is the Worldwar series. What if aliens with advanced, but not superadvanced technology, landed in the middle of World War Two with the goal of making earth a colony?   Good series, but like most of Turtledove's series it goes on too long. Great for the for the first few books.

[AllisonKraft]

I love the concept of time travel and attempting to change the past. I'm always intrigued by the "what if"s, and am drawn to stories where the past is changed, yet doing so makes things in the future worse. I guess I'm morbid that way. The butterfly effect is fascinating.

I also like the theory that events will happen to course-correct in order to keep the future the way it's meant to be. That there are certain things that have to happen, no matter what.

[Tony Richards]

Quantum physcis allows you to travel into the past, but Steven Hawking reckons it's unlikely for the following reason: You could go a week back into the past and shoot yourself. In which case, who shot you, because you already died a week ago? You've created an impossibility, in other words. And if the Universe went around allowing impossible things to happen, then reality would fall apart.

Sounds like a convincing argument.

[QuantumIguana]

Quantum physcis allows you to travel into the past, but Steven Hawking reckons it's unlikely for the following reason: You could go a week back into the past and shoot yourself. In which case, who shot you, because you already died a week ago? You've created an impossibility, in other words. And if the Universe went around allowing impossible things to happen, then reality would fall apart.

Sounds like a convincing argument.

True, but the universe does have a way of acting contrary to our expectations. Time travel would open up a whole new level of weirdness. I might be inclined to say it isn't really possible, but I don't think you can actually prove it with analogies.

[JFHilborne]

Actually - I think the concept is fascinating..  especially since I loved "11-22-63" by  King which was based on it..   What is really interesting are the side-effects of doing so which you may not have considered.   

Completely agree. I'm currently reading 11/22/63 and find the entire idea fascinating and the thought of what the repercussions might be.

[tamaraheiner]

I love alternate history. Of course they're not real. They're fiction. They are as viable an option as sci-fi or fantasy, except they have such an element of realism to them that often my ability to suspend my belief is greater than usual. Instead of just reading for entertainment, I'm learning and often thinking, "What if? What if things had been different?" And then I find myself just amazed that everything has actually turned out as well as it has.

[ImmortalInk]

I kind of like alternate history stories

[Lursa (aka 9MMare)]

Actually - I think the concept is fascinating..  especially since I loved "11-22-63" by  King which was based on it..   What is really interesting are the side-effects of doing so which you may not have considered.   

I also like the concept (and will probably grab King's new one when it comes down in price)...it sounds fascinating...but the little 'toe-dipping' I've done so far has been mediocre, so I am hesitant to jump back in.

It sounds very much like the types of sci-fi and dystopian/post-apocalyptic fiction that I like.....new/different worlds, cultures, societies. All the more fascinating because of how different they are from reality.