"The Other Side of Eden" Can history be changed?
I just finished my first draft of "The Other Side of Eden", an erotic science fiction story. My first drafts are always horrible, and that's the way I write them. It takes a long time, and many overhauls before I even know what the story is about. I think I know what this story is about, but I see at least two over hauls in the future.
One of the issues in this story is the question of time travel. Can the future be changed? My answer to this, which is how the first version of this story hangs together is "no". You can't change history.
Because history is relative.
Ray Bradbury wrote a classic science fiction story, way back when he was scary, called "The Sound of Thunder". Time travelers in the future have a business arranging safaris into the Cretaceous and hunting large dinosaurs. In order to make sure they don't change history, the trips are tightly regulated and only kill animals right before the moment they would have died of natural causes. Never the less, a hunter, terrified by his encounter with a Tyranosaur runs off the path. When they return to the future the world has drastically changed for the worse, because it turns out that he has stepped on a butterfly 65 million years ago.
But if you're not part of the team, how would you know? History is relative. In our own timeline Hitler was defeated. There's no reason to believe this is a given.
On June 30 1908, a 15 megaton explosion occurred over Tunguska Siberia and obliterated roughly 2150 square kilometers of uninhabited forest. No one really knows what it was, but the most plausible idea so far is that it was a fragment of comet ice hitting the atmosphere at cosmically high speed. What is interesting though is that it occurred on the same latitude as St Petersburg. If the earth had continued turning for another three hours before the bolide struck, it would have exploded (15 – 30 megatons!) dead center over St Petersburg; later called Leningrad, named for Vladimir Lenin who was living there at the time. A 15 megaton explosion would have wiped Petersburg – and Lenin – right off the face of the planet. Once you do that, a lot of dominos start to fall.
No Lenin – no Bolshevik revolution. Consequently Communism doesn't rise.
Hitler was defeated in Europe by a combination of American, British and Soviet forces. If there was no Soviet Union, Hitler may have won by negotiating a truce. There would also have been no cold war, which means the sixties and the baby boom generation would have turned out completely different.
You have to reduce these things to small terms in order to comprehend it. In "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to The Galaxy", Arthur Dent is unable to get his mind around the idea that the planet earth has been destroyed until Ford Prefect reminds him there is no longer such a thing as a McDonald's hamburger.
There would have been no Grateful Dead shows.
No Woodstock.
Holy shit. The mind boggles.
The thing is, suppose Petersburg got nuked by something falling out of the sky instead of Siberia. Would you miss the Cold War? Would you even know? Would Hitler running half of Europe seem strange? Not at all. We know only the world we live in. You wonder if there is a timeline somewhere in some parallel universe, where a mediocre young artist named Adolf Schicklgruber is admitted to the Vienna Art School after all, and spends his obscure life painting water color landscapes instead of changing his name to Hitler and destroying half the world.
Would there still be Volkswagens? Somewhere in a death camp a man or woman gasped out their life who might have gone on to cure cancer or invent time machines. There are inventions that don't exist in this world because that person is gone.
I have flat feet. Because I have flat feet, when I tried to join the Navy in 1973, the Navy docs rejected me and stamped me "1-Y", which is a kind of bottom of the barrel reserve. What if I had good feet? I'd have had a Navy career instead of pursuing religion with all of its complications in my life later. I would be married to someone else, had a different family and a different paycheck. My life would have gone into a different trajectory and my very spiritual identity would have been radically altered. Who would I be? Good?
World class evil?
Adolf Eichmann claimed he had nothing against Jews. He defended his massacre of them as an expression of his traditional Teutonic work ethic. He was efficient. He was dedicated. He said if he had been ordered to run the Nazi railroad system instead of the death camps, he would have run it as perfectly and productively as he was capable. He was a good bureaucrat with a dirty job and from his viewpoint he worked it hard and ran it well. Six million people can testify to his efficiency.
The good and evil we pride ourselves on in many ways is very thin, as thin as a coat of paint. What do we know of our lives? Somewhere in some other timeline Adolf Schicklgruber lived and died and his so-so watercolors are hanging in dentist's waiting rooms and the back room stalls of flea markets. Somewhere there is a smoldering crater where St Petersburg used to be and no one ever heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis or Fidel Castro. Somewhere six million Jews and their descendents are alive and well and like to go to Cuba for summer vacations and sea fishing. There is no Israel, only Palestine. There is no Al Qaeda. There is no middle eastern conflict, and Sept 11 2001 was just another day.