Alternate Histories

Tag Area: Time-Related Situation
Novella

Sidewise in Time

Leinster’s title provides hope that this could be an early story of mixed-era geography, and indeed, the world of the story does have seemingly different times adjacent to each other. But we soon find out that these different times are actually the result of alternative histories that have been played out to the twentieth century and then appeared in different geographic areas. Yep! The Norse settled the Americas! The South won the war! The dinosaurs never died! And they're all next door to pompous Professor Minott and his merry band of students. —Michael Main
There are an indefinite nubmer of possible futures, any one of which we would encounter if we took the proper ‘forks” in time.
A series of four pen-and-ink panels show Roman soldiers, dinosaurs, and vikings.
  • Science Fiction
  • No Time Phenomena
Feature Film

It’s a Wonderful Life

If it’s any time in December (and possibly November), just turn on the TV and this Christmas classic will show you an alternative past without George Bailey, but there’s no time travel to that past or any other—just viewing. —Michael Main
Don’t you understand, George? It’s because you were never born.
A joyful Jimmy Stewart raises Donna Reed high over his head by her waist.
  • Fantasy
  • Time Phenomena
Short Story

All the Myriad Ways

Detective-Lieutenant Gene Trimble suspects that the recent spate of suicides and violent crime is somehow connected to the discovery that the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics is real and each of those worlds can be traveled to. —Michael Main
There were timelines branching and branching, a mega-universe of universes, millions more every minute. Billions? Trillions? Trimble didn’t understand the theory, though God knows he’d tried. The universe split every time someone made a decision. Split, so that every decision every made could go both ways. Every choice ever made by every man, woman and child on Earth was reversed in the universe next door.
Pen-and-ink drawing of multiple overlapping images of a man with a gun sitting at a desk.
  • 1969 Hugo
  • Science Fiction
  • Mystery and Crime
  • No Time Phenomena
Novelette

Trips

  • by Robert Silverberg
  • in The Feast of St. Dionysus (Charles Scribner’s Sons, March 1975)
Silverberg’s introduction to “Trip” in the collection Trips, vol. 4 of the Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg (Subterranean Press, 2009), states that he wrote the story with the goal of being the ultimate alternative universes story, and he lived up to that goal, devising nearly a dozen alternative Bay Area universes for his hero Cameron to express his wanderlust. Admittedly, there’s no actual time travel because the story was part of an anthology of ultimate sf, and Silverberg left the time travelin’ to Philip K. Dick’s “A Little Something for Us Tempunauts.” But there is a world that Cameron thinks is a 1950s San Francisco (it isn’t) and there’s a chance that Cameron experiences the passage of time at rates that differ from world to world.

Warning: The first publication of the story in that ultimate anthology (Final Stage: The Ultimate Science Fiction Anthology) was “cut to shreds” by a ham-handed editor at Charterhouse, so your best bet is to read it in one of Silverberg’s later collections. —Michael Main
There’s an infinity of worlds, Elizabeth, side by side, worlds in which all possible variations of every possible event take place. Worlds in which you and I are happily married, in which you and I have been married and divorced, in which you and I don’t exist, in which you exist and I don’t, in which we meet and loathe one another, in which—in which—do you see, Elizabeth, there's a world for everything, and I’ve been traveling from world to world.
A yellow light emanates from a tower, illuminating a barron landscape with a person in a spacesuit and a woman in a voluminous dress.
  • Science Fiction
  • Time Phenomena
Novella

The Hemingway Hoax

Literature professor John Baird and conman Sylvester Castlemaine hatch a plan to get rich forging Hemingway’s lost stories, but before long, Baird is confronted by an apparent guardian of the many timelines in the form of Hemingway himself. —Michael Main
I’m from the future and the past and other temporalities that you can’t comprehend. But all you need to know is that yiou must not write this Hemingway story. If you do, I or someone like me will have to kill you.
A Hemingway-esqu man has various heads and appendages coming out of his head.
  • 1991 Hugo
  • 1991 Nebula
  • Science Fiction
  • Horror
  • Comedy
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

Miri and Molly 1

The Magic Half

As a middle child stuck between two sets of twins, eleven-year-old Miri Gill feels an outsider until one day in her attic room, she slips back in time from the 21st century to 1935 where she meets Molly, another eleven-year-old who needs her help.

Also in need of some help is the model of time travel in the story, which is a mishmash of popular representations that no person at age eleven or elsewhen should be exposed to. Specifically, I would have enjoyed an attempt to square the Branching Timeline implied by the hole in floor with the single nonbranching, static timeline and Ex Nihilo paradox hinted at by the time-travel device. I truly liked that ex nihilo paradox, and wish it had been explicitly dealt with rather than swept under the carpet. —Michael Main
If you think about it too long, you’re going to go crazy, and then I’ll never get to your time.
Two eleven-year-old girls, one with long braids and the other with long, untied hair, float in front of rose-patterned wallpaper.
  • Fantasy
  • Audience: Children
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

La La Land

We convinced the ITTDB muckety-mucks to include La La Land in our list based on James Bojaciuk’s impassioned argument that Mia and Seb’s love is “so deep they not only broke time, [but] in the space of a few minutes they lived an entire year and decided on what their destiny should have been.” Is it actually time travel? Probably not, but take a look at Bojaciuk’s blog and read the cited quotes from writer/director Damien Chazelle before you commit yourself to saying no to Mia, Seb, and La La Land. —Michael Main
Mia:: I’m always gonna love you.
Sebastian: I’m always gonna love you, too.
Behind an abstract design of a blue-toned piano keyboard, Emma Stone (as Mia) leaps into the arms of Ryan Gosling (as Sebastian) for a kiss.
  • Romance
  • Music and Musicals
  • Time Phenomena
Novel

The Ottoman Secret

Secret police agent Kamal teams with his sister-in-law Nisreen, fleeing through time from pursuing gunmen who killed Nisreen’s family because toprotect the secret that their world was created by a violent temporal disruptor who altered history in favor of an autocratic Islam theocracy. —Michael Main
Nisreen: I want to know how it is different and why he wanted to change it. Don’t you see? That’s how the world was supposed to be.

Ramazan: Assuming no one else had gone back and changed things before he did.
A man and a woman flee under a red Turkish flag that hangs from the Eiffel tower.
  • Science Fiction
  • Fantasy
  • War
  • Definite Time Travel
Flash Fiction

Agent 3203.7

The seventh incarnation of Agent 3203 is once again tasked with preventing a thoughtful assassin from carrying out a political mission for the good of humanity. —Michael Main
He’s destroying my world!
Eliezer Yudkowsky examines the wall on Platform 9 3/4 at King’s Cross Station.
  • Satire
  • Definite Time Travel
Cartoon

What If  . . . ? (s1e01)

What If . . . Captain Carter Were the First Avenger?

The Watcher tells us of a universe where a change in a single decision made Peggy Carter (rather than Steve Rogers) become the Allies’ super-soldier. Like Steve, Peggy also manages to find her way into modern times via a technique that’s related to time travel. —Michael Main
Agent Carter, wouldn’t you be more comfortable in the booth?
A mash-up drawing of Hayley Atwell (as Captain Carter, the first super-soldier) with parts of Captain America mixed in.
  • Eloi Bronze Medal
  • Superhero
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Time Phenomena
Novelette

Secret Agent Moe Berg #6

Billie the Kid

In an alternate history leading up to a 1945 atomic bomb in southern California, young Billie “the Kid” Davis grows up in the mid-20th century, playing shortstop better than any of the boys, flying B-25s with her Dad, and eventually—with Moe Berg and the woman-with-many-names—taking on that bomb. —Michael Main
This is your moment, Billie. Coming up right now. Save the worlds, Billie. Change everything. You can do it.
A woman in a U.S. astronaut suit pulls a sled over a yellow landscape with a black dragon roaring in the distance.
  • Science Fiction
  • Sports
  • War
  • Definite Time Travel
Cartoon

What If  . . . ? (s01e04)

What If . . . Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?

As we all know, when the world’s formost surgeon, Doctor Strange, lost the use of his hands in a car wreck, it prompted him to search out mystic treatments and eventually become the Master of the Mystic Arts. But what if he had lost something else in that wreck? —Michael Main
The Ancient One: Her death is an Absolute Point in time.
Dr. Strange: Absolute?
A.O.: Unchangable. Unmovable. Without her death, you would never have defeated Dormamu and become the Sorcerer Supreme—and the guardian of the Eye of Agamotto. If you erase her death, you never start your journey.
A computer animated cartoon drawing of Benedict Cumberbatch (as Doctor Strange) casting a spell.
  • Eloi Silver Medal
  • Fantasy
  • Superhero
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Definite Time Travel