Nature Future Conditional

The story behind the story: Going back for Hitler

This week, Futures takes a trip back in time with George Nikolopoulos in an attempt to change the course of history. In Going back for Hitler, George ponders the problems of messing with the past. You can find out more about George‘s work at his website or by following him on Twitter. Here, he reveals the inspiration behind his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Going back for Hitler

I’ve always been both fascinated and repulsed by time-travel stories, mostly because of the paradox, or should I say the paradoxes, because there’s more than one.

One paradox is that if you travel back in time to change events that happened before you were born, then there are millions of ways to prevent you from ever being born, and so who was it that went back to change history? And if you’re going back to the future after the deed, to what future will you return? One way to solve this issue is to assume that by going back in time and making changes you’re just creating a new time strand, one that is free to take a new course onward. So, when you return to your own future nothing at all will have changed, but just by going back you have created a new parallel universe. Of course there’s also a theory that all conceivable universes already exist, so in fact your sojourn in time has accomplished nothing.

But the most disconcerting paradox is the ‘neat’ solution. If, as happens in many time-travel stories and most time-travel films, everything finally fits together so neatly that travelling back to the past was what actually made the present happen, then this means that either there’s no past or future and everything happens simultaneously, which is something very hard for the human mind to comprehend, to say the least, or that there’s no free will and everything has been preordained since the beginning of time, which is more than a little depressing.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I woke up one morning with not one but two fully formed stories in my mind, about time travellers who go back to kill the most infamous villain of all time — but with a different twist each. I think of them as ‘twin’ stories, though they are completely independent of each other. The one (You can always change the past) was published in Galaxy’s Edge and was reprinted a few days ago in The Year’s Best Military & Adventure SF, and the other (Going back for Hitler) is now in Nature — and I’m very proud for both of them. I have, in fact, overcome my aversion to time-travel stories, so there’s a possibility I might even go on to write a whole series of mini-‘going-back-to-kill-Hitler’ stories with different outcomes.

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