Time Travel. A History

In Stephen Fry’s variation, the hero is a student historian named Michael Young. (One wonders—why do our imaginative time-travel writers keep naming their characters Young?) In this variation, he hopes to change history not by assassinating Hitler but by sterilizing his father: “The historian as God. I know so much about you, Mr. So-Called Hitler, that I can stop you from being born.” And then? Will the twentieth century live happily ever after? (“It was insane of course. I knew that. It couldn’t possibly work. You can’t change the past. You can’t redesign the present.”) All you can do is ask, What if? The novelist makes the world. Kate Atkinson’s 2013 novel, Life After Life, changes the rules yet again. The shooting of Hitler comes in the opening scene: our heroine, Ursula Todd (surname death this time) fires her father’s old service revolver at the Führer across the table in a Munich café in 1930. Then she dies, and she keeps on dying, again and again, at different ages, in different ways, always starting over and trying to do it right. Her alternative lives are like strands of spaghetti in a pot. “History is all about ‘what ifs,’ ” someone tells her, as if she didn’t know. Someone else urges, “We must bear witness…we must remember these people when we are safely in the future.” Atkinson, the author, said later, “I am in that future now, and I suppose this book is my bearing witness to the past.”

One consequence of Hitler’s being the favorite victim of time-traveling assassins is that he keeps on coming back to life. Here he is, living in the Amazon jungle, ninety years old, in George Steiner’s novel The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H. Or alive and well in Berlin, still führer of the Greater German Reich, having won World War II in Robert Harris’s Fatherland. Or syphilitic and senile, in The Man in the High Castle

by Philip K. Dick—Germany has won the war, because in this history it was the young Franklin D. Roosevelt who was assassinated before he could put his strong hand on the tiller of history. The variations on this theme continue to multiply. As a literary genre, these counterfactual narratives are called alternative history in English, or ucronía, uchronie, etc., or allohistory. The labels arose only in the mid to late twentieth century, when the genre began to explode, fed by time travel and branching universes, but in 1930 James Thurber was presciently satirizing it in the

New Yorker magazine, in his story “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox” (identified as a follow-up to “If Booth Had Missed Lincoln,” “If Lee Had Won the Battle of Gettysburg,” and “If Napoleon Had Escaped to America”). Professionals ask similar questions these days. The humor bleeds into academic historiography. It’s possible to become quite obsessed with historical contingency. In a comprehensive study, The World Hitler Never Made, Gavriel D. Rosenfeld analyzed as many of the Nazi variations as he could find to see how many ended up making history “the same or worse without Hitler as opposed to being better.”^*6

There are few happy endings, he found. It is often the writers of science fiction or “speculative fiction” who give us, not only the weirdest, but the most rigorously analyzed approaches to the working of history.

It all might have been different. For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost. I coulda been a contender. Regret is the time traveler’s energy bar. If only…something. Every writer nowadays knows about the butterfly effect. The slightest flutter might alter the course of great events. A decade before the meteorologist and chaos theorist Edward Lorenz chose the butterfly for illustrative purposes, Ray Bradbury deployed a history-changing butterfly in his 1952 story “A Sound of Thunder.” Here the time machine—the Machine, a vague mess of “silver metal” and “roaring light”—carries paying sightseers on Time Safaris back to the era of the dinosaurs. Apart from the addition of oxygen helmets and intercoms, the time travel itself is pure Wells: “The Machine howled. Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them….The Machine slowed; its scream fell to a murmur.” The Safari operators, though, try to be careful about leaving everything unchanged, because they worry about history.

A little error here would multiply in sixty million years, all out of proportion….A dead mouse here makes an insect imbalance there, a population disproportion later, a bad harvest further on, a depression, mass starvation….Perhaps only a soft break, a whisper, a hair, pollen on the air, such a slight, slight change that unless you looked close you wouldn’t see it. Who knows?