David Foster and I were trying to remember a joke today to tell to Jean, known to some of you as The New Neo. We kept screwing it up and couldn't get it right. I finally figured it out.
A man is given the gift of time travel for one event. He decides to go back to 1918 and kill Adolph Hitler. He comes back discouraged and his friend asks him "Didn't it work?"
"No," said the time traveler "I couldn't find Adolph Hitler anywhere. I had to settle for killing Woodrow Wilson."
His friend looked puzzled. "Who's Adolph Hitler?"
8 comments:
A good joke and a reasonable point, although one wonders whose name we might know instead in that counterfactual. But hey -- we might not know Stalin's or Mao's either, so....
My rule of thumb on the great villains is that they are especially bad, but the times bring them forth. If No Hitler, we would probably get Hitler Lite. The long-term consequences of that, even for Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs, might not be better.
I know of only two SF authors who came up with time travel settings in which changeable history made sense, was logically consistent. Isaac Asimov wrote a one-off novel called The End of Eternity and Fritz Leiber wrote a few short stories and a short novel about "The Change War." Both settings introduce a second dimension of time, a hyper-time, over which the primary time can change its contents. Asimov's was called "Eternity"; Leiber's was "the Big Time."
It's a great idea, but I have found it very tricky to put into practice.
Dinosaur Beach, by Keith Laumer?
Here's an idea: you kill Archduke Ferdinand, but you do it in Austria.
Now that's intriguing. There are alt-history sites of many kinds, some of very slight and very possible deviations from what did happen, others that are more of a stretch. Myself, if I don't have significant modern knowledge, I'm not interested in going back. Think of all the conversations that were boring the first time...
October the First is Too Late, by Fred Hoyle
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