Reply #99: there's a certain kind of time travel story where if you change anything, you change everything [View All]

for some reason, in this genre of story, if you change something in the past, even for the better, then you have changed the entire stream of time and it's always a bad thing because, after all, we in the present are the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Teh Universe so if time and history is changed, and therefore our present is changed, then this can only be bad

it is not a storyline invented by harlan ellison, it's just a standard time travel story plotline you see over and over again when you read old time travel stories

in many ways the time travel story is a very conservative genre, as is the fairy tale, the moral of the story always seems to be, "if you try to fix it, you'll just fuck it up even worse"

a modern example which i actually greatly enjoyed (for that matter i greatly enjoyed the edith keeler tale on star trek) was "the butterfly effect" -- it was just classic, everything the poor feeb did to improve his life made it more and more fucked up

i suppose this sort of thing has its roots in the old greek tradition of fate -- you can run but you can't hide from fate