Time and Time Again
- by Ben Elton
- Novel
- Science Fiction
- Adults
- Definite Time Travel
- English
- Time and Time Again by Ben Elton (Bantam, November 2014).
Hugh Stanton is recruited by cadre of Cambridge professors to use Isaac Newton’s technology to fix the past 111 years starting the the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
—Michael Main
‘Tell me, Mr. Bentley,’ Newton asked, staring at the dregs in his wine glass, which was empty once more, ‘if God gave you the chance to change one thing in history, would you do it? And if so, what would you change?’
Tags
(33)
- Time Periods
- Circa AD 1700 to 1799: Newton’s time
- Circa AD 1900 to 1929: Stanton in Constantinople: 1914
- Circa AD 2000 to 2099: Stanton’s time: 2024–25
- Timeline Models
- Remembering Other Timelines: The traveler remembers his own pruned timeline.
- Pruned Timeline: When a traveler arrives from the future, the timeline is pruned from the arrival point forward. The Order even discusses the morals of wiping out billions of people on the pruned timeline.
- Time Travel Methods
- Time Portal: The small portal in Istanbul is open only briefly to take Stanton from 2025 to 1914.
- Themes
- Adjacent Times: Time is a helix, but it can be distorted by gravitational forces, causing different points of the helix to briefly touch.
- Alternate Histories
- Fix History!: Do you really think you have a right to fail to prevent a catastrophe just because that catastrophe has already happened?
- Fix Someone Else’s Timeline Wreckage!: Katie comes back to fix Stanton’s screw up.
- Fix Your Time Travel Screw-Up!: Stanton joins Katie to fix his own screw-up.
- Kill the Despot/Psychopath/Etc. (excluding Hitler): Wilhelm II
- Making Things Worse
- Resetting Time Like Nothing Happened: An alternate way to look at the effect of time traveling is that all of time is rewound to the traveler’s point of arrival. Indeed the book proclaims: Time had rebooted itself and the last one hundred and eleven years were once more in the future.
- Save the Bigwig (excluding JFK and Lincoln)!: the Archduke
- Time Corps: The Companions of Chronos is charged by Newton with fixing history as it sees fit.
- True Histories: the true story of Newton’s breakdown
- Western Union from a Time Traveler in the Past: the letters left in Constantinople
- Real-World Tags
- Fictional Tags
- Dystopian World: Year 103 of the New Order World
Variants
(1)
- Time and Time Again by Ben Elton (Bantam, November 2014).