“Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.”
In “The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate” by Ted Chiang
I could write a review for each one of the stories in this collection, but my favourite is the “The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate”.
If I had a Time Machine, I would save my time machine journey time (just in case it breaks down after too much use) until I had paid someone to type out the whole Harry Potter series for me and would travel back to just before J.K. Rowling started writing them and start negotiations with publishers....with my Harry Potter royalties I would then travel to the US and make some large investments into Facebook in its earlier stages and find the Whassapp guys and offer them a lot of money for a large share in their start-up! Or I'd kill Heinseberg to stop all the nonsense with the Quantum World. It'd probably not change anything as there would just be another nutter round the corner with the same idea, and then where do you stop, do you save every person killed by power crazed psychos, you would die of old age before you had the chance to keep travelling around. I will just take my Harry Potter, Facebook and Whatsapp money and do a load of good things with it instead; or maybe the publishers would reject it, since I'm not the sort of author they were looking for; or with the extra early on cash, I decide I'm rich enough and can't be shagged with my Facebook lark anymore and it never gets off the ground. Or If I had killed Julius Caesar instead, long before Brutus got him, we could all be speaking Welsh, which could have become the dominant language of the world! Or, as a keen photographer, I'd like to go back with my digital camera and photograph great events in history. I would have the knowledge of when and where they would happen, and I would do it unobtrusively so that it would not affect the course of history. But only If my camera would work before it had been invented! It'd inevitably be stolen/lost and fall into the hands of the Nazis, allowing a team led by Werner Heisenberg to reverse-engineer the microprocessor and use it to develop a dramatically improved guidance system for the V2 rocket, and a secure cipher machine that Bletchley Park could not break, drastically altering the course of the war? On balance, it seems safer to take a 1930s Leica - they still work very well, and you can buy film locally. Not sure if time travel fogs it, though...Of course, going back in time might not affect the past, but those pictures could well affect the future. Imagine if I had a clear, indisputable video of Moses parting the red sea or the resurrection of Christ. Such things would fundamentally alter society. Who knows? Read Chiang instead. Even when it's at it's most fantastical it's very definitively SF as SF.
SF = Speculative Fiction.
