Ok, here is a cool one that came to me the other day.
One of the time traveling cliches is that of someone going back in time to kill off some infamous world leader in his/her infancy, thus changing the course of history and averting a major disaster (or causing an even bigger one). It’s a common what if scenario: what if someone went back in time and killed Hitler? (Red Alert) What if someone went back in time and supplied the Confederacy with AK-47s? (The Guns of the South)
Well, here’s my take on it: what if time traveling agents have ALWAYS been going back in time, trying to fix up problems like this? What if history is one long story of the screw ups of a bunch of secret agents trying to alter things, trying to get it right, trying to get to some kind of utopia?
Of course, by altering history, they alter their own futures, making it impossible to go back to the future from which they came. Which means that they would have to go forward, see how it worked out, then go back again to make another change, take out another horrible world leader, then go forward again, etc etc.
If that’s the case, perhaps our universe is actually one of the “rough drafts” that this agency has been working on. Perhaps our universe is so screwed up because the agency hasn’t yet made all of the changes they want to make…not in this timeline, anyway.
In order for this to work, the people of this agency would have to all travel together, since leaving someone behind before going back to make alterations would mean leaving that person behind in a timeline that could never be reached again. From this, two things follow: 1) the time travelers would have to have some kind of a really cool ship, on which they all live and travel, and 2) they would be completely autonomous from any kind of government or other institution limited to one particular timeline.
This raises a number of ethical questions. Is it wrong to go back and alter the course of history in this way? Do the people in the original timeline cease to exist, or do they continue to exist in a parallel universe? If you take the latter view, how does that alter the ethics of changing things? You’re not really screwing people over–they still exist, just in an invisible parallel universe. And you’re trying to make the world a better place, too. But, then again…you’re basically playing god with history, and that sounds pretty unethical.
My idea for incorporating this into a story is this: a regular guy from our time bumps into these time travelers and gets sucked into their little plot to build a utopia. He has to struggle with getting taken out of his world, never to return (or never to return to it quite the way it was). There could possibly be a love story of some kind, especially if these are steampunk time travelers (perhaps that would explain why the 20th century was more spectacularly screwed up than any other–the time travelers started in the 1800s and are more concerned about their era than after their era. But then, there are also divisions and disagreements among the time travelers, with some getting fed up and discouraged with the whole thing, others (possibly the leader) with megalomania, and others who are beginning to have doubts about the morality of their undertaking.
Pretty cool, neh? Now, back to doing homework… 😛
I’m fairly certain I will *never* write a time travel story. =/ I mean, if you go change the past, and you’re from the future, hasn’t the past already happened, and what you go do is actually what you already did? Well, theoretically.
Also, I’ve always seen a problem with the actual act of creating a time machine. I mean, let’s say you spend forty years working on one, and you finally get it to work. Wouldn’t you immediately then just go back in time and tell your 40-years-younger self how to make it work? =D
A fun book I read that dealt with parallel universes was a book called “Here, There, and Everywhere.” It’s about a character who can not only travel through time, but through alternate realities. Because everything that can possibly happen does happen, the main character can do whatever she wants, because the reality she affects is only one out of infinity, and is already bound to happen anyways. Basically there’s no way to ruin your world’s history, because every choice you can possibly make *is* made, and is simply just splitting off into multiple realities. It was a silly book, but kind of fun to think about. She even runs into some people that are out to protect “the timeline,” but their mission is pointless because there’s already an infinite number of versions of their timeline existing.