Time Travel. A History

When the future meets the past, the future has a knowledge advantage. Yet the past is not easily swayed. Mind you, we’re talking about our imaginations—the imaginations of professional imaginers, especially. “Time,” wrote the novelist Ian McEwan early in his career—“not necessarily as it is, for who knows that, but as thought has constituted it—monomaniacally forbids second chances.” The rules of time travel have been written not by scientists but by storytellers.

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WHEN THEY DID start trying to change history, so many of them came up with the perfect plan. They tried to kill Hitler. They are still trying, to this day. It’s easy to see why. Others have done great evil and caused great suffering (Stalin, Mao…), but one man looms above the others with his combination of monstrosity and charisma. “Adolf Hitler. Hitler, Hitler, Hitler,” says Stephen Fry, in his time-travel novel, Making History. If only Hitler can be unmade. The entire twentieth century gets a do-over. The idea arose even before the United States entered the war: the July 1941 issue of Weird Tales featured a story called “I Killed Hitler” by Ralph Milne Farley, pseudonym for a Massachusetts politician and pulp writer, Roger Sherman Hoar. An American painter resents the German dictator for several reasons and goes back in time to wring the neck of ten-year-old Adolf. (Surprise: the result, when he returns to the present, is not what he expected.) By the end of the 1940s, Hitler’s death at the hands of time travelers was already a meme. It is taken for granted in “Brooklyn Project,” a 1948 story by Philip Klass, publishing under the name William Tenn. The Brooklyn Project is a secret government experiment in time travel. “As you know,” an official explains, “one of the fears entertained about travel to the past was that the most innocent-seeming acts would cause cataclysmic changes in the present. You are probably familiar with the fantasy in its most currently popular form—if Hitler had been killed in 1930.” Impossible, he explains. Scientists have proven beyond doubt that time is “a rigid affair, past, present, and future, and nothing in it could be altered.” He keeps saying so, even as the project’s time-traveling “chronar” makes its way into prehistory and he and his listeners fail to notice that they are now slimy bloated creatures waving purple pseudopods.

Stephen Dedalus says memorably in Ulysses that history is a nightmare from which he is trying to awake. Is there no escape? What if Julius Caesar had not been murdered on the Senate steps, or Pyrrhus killed in Argos? “Time has branded them,” thinks Stephen, “and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave, weaver of the wind.”

Can these eager assassins change history or can’t they? For a while, every new story seemed to offer a new theory. Alfred Bester, a New York PR man turned sci-fi writer, invented his own special variation of you can’t change history for his 1958 story, “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed.” The unhappy protagonist, Henry Hassel, angered by discovering his wife “in the arms of” another man, goes on an ever-more-murderous rampage through history, armed with his time machine and a .45-caliber pistol, killing parents and grandparents and historical figures near and far, Columbus, Napoleon, Mohammed (everyone but Hitler), and nothing seems to work. The wife continues in her merry ways. Why? Another sad time traveler finally explains:

“My boy, time is entirely subjective. It’s a private matter….We each travel into our own past, and no other person’s. There is no universal continuum, Henry. There are only billions of individuals, each with his own continuum; and one continuum cannot affect the other. We’re like millions of strands of spaghetti in the same pot….Each of us must travel up and down his strand alone.”

From branching paths to spaghetti strands.