Set Right What Once Went Wrong / Literature

Setting Right What Once Went Wrong in Literature.

Series Plots

• Teresa Edgerton's The Grail and the Ring has an interesting take on this. Strictly speaking, Time Travel is not possible. However, Functional Magic allows one to travel to the Inner Celydonn, to a shadow of the past, where one can see what really happened if one doesn't try to derail events. This quasi-Time Travel is used to find out What Once Went Wrong, so that it can be Set Right in the present, thus avoiding any Temporal Paradoxes.
• The Caretaker Trilogy focuses on people from a future where the world's ecosystem has been ruined coming back to the present: the "Turning Point", or the point at which it was theorized to still be possible to reverse the damage done. Their foes, who actually like the future as it is, also come back, with the aim of speeding up the damage, and ensuring their own victory.
• A Christmas Carol has this with ghosts warning of the deaths of both Tiny Tim and Scrooge, which Scrooge then fixes thanks to Scare 'Em Straight.
  Ghost of Christmas Present: I see a vacant chair and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unchanged by the future, the child will die!
• In Mergers by Steven L. Layne, the titular Mergers must go back in time to make sure that a man named Michael Quinn dies as a young boy. The reason why is that Senator Broogue went back in time before the Mergers were born and saved Michael from dying, thus causing the creation of a society with only one race. Somewhat different from the usual situation, in that usually it is the opposite (the travellers saving the person).
• The Messenger Series: A messenger's duty is to follow the threads of a terrible legacy that's haunting the present time back into the past until they can find the cause and resolve it. The resolution isn't necessarily to stop the original event that happened, but the discovery of that event allows them to right the wrong that will end the curse. In her first mission, learning what Roger did is what allows her to reach Leonora through space and time to save her life, thereby ending the curse of the annexe house.
• Throughout the early Nightside series, John Taylor is pursued by the Harrowing, constructs sent from an After the End future to kill him before he can begin investigating the Nightside's origins. A bit of a subversion, as it's implied the constructs' creators are motivated as much by bitterness and revenge as a need to avert What Went Wrong; else, they could've just sent someone to tell John his investigation would kick off an apocalypse, so he'd turn down the case.
• The protagonist of Jack Chalker's Downtiming the Nightside is forced to choose sides in a temporal war. Naturally, both sides claim to be battling those who would Make Wrong What Once Went Right in order to set right what once went wrong.
  • Poul Anderson's The Corridors of Time has essentially the same plot, with added saga and mythology.
• Elizabeth Haydon's Symphony of Ages is this all over.
• The Empirium Trilogy: The main gist of the Prophet's plan is to use Simon's time traveling magic to go back into the past and have Eliana convince Rielle to kill Corien. This will nip the Undying Empire in the bud, as well as all the other horrific plans Corien has enacted during the Third Age.
• Thursday Next's father's intent throughout The Eyre Affair. Whatever else they feel it important to talk about, her father always asks Thursday about the outcome of some major battle. His normal response is to swear and vanish (presumably to the battle he asked about), but the whole thing is lampshaded when he asks about one he asked about earlier in the book, and Thursday exasperatedly tells him that the answer hasn't changed since he last asked, but the actual answer she gives is different.
• This is one of the main plots in Roger Zelazny's Roadmarks, which has a road that travels from one end of time to another with off-ramps into various alternate histories. If an off-ramp doesn't get used, it eventually vanishes. The main protagonist, Red Dorakeen keeps trying to run modern firearms to the Battle of Marathon to change the outcome, thus re-creating an off-ramp that will allow him to find his lost home. At one point he sees Hitler, traveling in a VW Bug, "trying to find the place where he won."
• Diana Wynne Jones:
  • In Witch Week a cataclysmic event has caused an alternate universe to split off, which is identical to ours in every way except that magic exists and witches are persecuted and burned. In order to merge the universes, the characters have to work out what the cataclysm was, and use their combined magic to change history so the universes will never have split in the first place. As a side-effect, various characters' parents haven't been executed or imprisoned in the new universe.
  • In A Tale of Time City there's a lot of time travelling, but you can only change the past in an "unstable era". The characters travel three times to the same station platform in 1939 in an attempt to change the results of events, but the results are unpredictable and they never manage to improve the situation. Meanwhile, the changes they cause create greater instability each time...
• Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity is based on this trope. A group known as Eternity exists outside of time, constantly intervening to maintain peace and order. However, in the end, it is discovered that their constant maintaining of a peaceful world resulted, in the long run, in the extinction of humanity, and the entire Eternity program is prevented from beginning. Specifically, the issue is that Eternity's constant attempts at preventing even minor disasters keeps humanity from making the kinds of important discoveries that only come about due to trial-and-error. Thus, humanity never expands into space and eventually stagnates.
• The capacity for doing this appears in the later books of Peter F. Hamilton's Void Trilogy. It turns out that "The Void", a Pocket Dimension accessible via a giant singularity has a "reset to time X" function built in, accessible to anyone that knows it's there; as is traditional everyone but the resetter forgets the original timeline. (The downside is that the act of rewinding an entire dimension needs lots of energy, and the Void obtains that by expanding and eating a bit more of the surrounding "real" galaxy's mass. This isn't very popular in the real galaxy.)
• Attempted in the novel Time And Again, sequel to From Time to Time (unrelated to the Naruto Fan Fic of the same name). In this universe, time travel to the past is possible for a select few with the proper training. The main character in Time and Again goes back to 1912 in an attempt to prevent World War 1. He knows that there was a man who went to Europe to negotiate an agreement that could have prevented the war, but the agreement never made it back to the US. He later finds out that this was because the man and agreement went down with the Titanic. His next attempt is to prevent the ship from sinking. Another time agent alters the ship's course the tiniest bit, so that the ship will miss the iceberg by a few inches. Turns out that her alteration was what caused the ship to hit the iceberg.
• The premise of R. J. Rummel's Never Again series of novels is the main characters traveling back to 1906 to undo all the atrocities of the Twentieth Century and to spread democracy throughout the world. It gets a lot more complicated than it seems at first.
• Subverted in Pendragon where Bobby thinks that he setting right what once went wrong by stopping the Hindenberg's destruction, but if he had stopped it, he would have doomed the entire world.
• In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories, both a villain's motive, and a constant temptation to the members of the Patrol, who can sometimes even pull it off with carefully enough handled Tricked Out Time.
• Dak, Sera and Riq's goal in the children's book and web game series, Infinity Ring.
• In Before I Fall, Sam dies in a car crash and wakes up again on the same day. She ends up reliving that last day 7 times in a "Groundhog Day" Loop, and dying in all but one of them. The book is mostly her trying to figure out how to get out of the loop. She figures out that she has to stop Juliet from committing suicide.
• The German pulp SF series "Perry Rhodan" has used this trope several times. The most significant case is an artificial plague that almost sterilises the whole Galaxy until one of the few survivors travels into the past and prevents its outbreak.
• In Manifold: Time, the post-human 'downstreamers' from the heat death of universe several trillion years in the future begins broadcasting messages to Earth in the early 21st century to change the fate of the universe. Their message is simple: the name of a very unusual asteroid, 1987-3753 - better known as 3753 Cruithne - with something very special on it.
• Gradually revealed to be the whole plot of Mindwarp, a series about middle-schoolers with super-powers being hunted by aliens. They're not aliens, but super-soldiers (called Omegas) from the future who nuked and took over the world. Their missing parents are different super-soldiers (Alphas) who traveled back in time to prevent both their and the Omegas' creation, but the one with time-travel powers and relevant knowledge got cold feet and ditched them in the wrong era. The Omegas hunted them all down after they settled down and had kids, and the kids go on to complete their parent's mission.
• In All Our Yesterdays, this is Em's mission, and something she's failed at 14 times before the story properly begins.
• Stephen King's work 11/22/63 is about Jake Epping traveling to 1958 with the intent of living there until the eponymous date so that he can stop Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating John Kennedy. It doesn't turn out well.
• In the short story "Time and Time Again" by H. Beam Piper, Allan Hartley is fatally injured in the Battle of Buffalo during World War III in 1975 and his 43-year-old mind is sent back in time to his 13-year-old body on August 5, 1945. In the original history, the lay preacher and religious fanatic Frank Gutchall murdered his wife using a Colt-.38 special that Allan's father Blake had loaned him. He claimed that he needed it to put his injured dog out of its misery. Remembering the original incident, Allan gives Gutchall his father's Luger after removing its firing pin. He then calls the police station, pretending to be his father, and tells them that Gutchall is planning to kill his wife. Gutchall is arrested and eventually committed. Allan saved Mrs. Gutchall's life as an experiment to determine whether the future could be altered. Armed with the knowledge that it can be, his plan is to start a political organization in Pennsylvania in 1950 with the goal of electing Blake to the presidency in 1960 and preventing the outbreak of World War III.
• The Otome styled Reincarnate in Another World subgenre of novels runs into this trope quite a bit. Oftentimes the heroine will be a girl who suddenly wakes up in the body of the villainess of a game/story she once consumed, with full knowledge of what awaits her (exile, poverty, death, ending up with a guy she didn't like in the original story) if she proceeds without changing her personality or circumstances. The story then usually has her do everything she can to make the love interests not hate her, the heroine squared away, and herself safe and maybe with a man she loves.
• In the short story Damage on the Line by Kir Bulychev, a man discovers a malfunctioning time machine channel and mends it, and the technician from the future asks if he needs help with anything in return. The man asks him to bring a box of food supplies to his favorite writer, who died of starvation in Leningrad during World War II and didn't finish his last novel, and after some consideration the technician agrees. After a while, the novel is still unfinished and the writer's biographies unaltered, so the hero concludes the time travelers decided not to do it after all. Then he finds memoirs of the writer's friend. It turns out the writer did receive an anonymous parcel with food, but gave it all away to his neighbors' little children.
• The protagonist of Mother of Learning is repeating the same month endlessly. Eventually, he learns that the loop was initiated in order to find a way to stop a primordial from being released into the world.
• Operation Do-Over: Mason and Ty are stereotypical geeks and best friends until they let their rivalry for Class Princess Ava's affections turn them into bitter enemies for the next five years (which also costs both of them a chance with Ava). This leads to Mason being expelled after a fight with Ty during their junior year and getting into a car crash soon afterward. However, the car crash sends Mason's consciousness back in time to when he was twelve, right before he and Ty first met Ava. Mason strives to keep Ava from coming between him and Ty (which is easier said than done), keep his parents from divorcing, ensure that his dog will not die in a traffic accident, treat his and Ty's Butt-Monkey friend Clarisse better, and find a way to stop the bullying that will plague him for the next five years.
• This turned out to be the goal of Queen Elisha in How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom. It turns out that her Dark Magic (in this setting, “Dark” simply means “Uncategorical” and not evil) is the ability to send the memories of herself and others to their past selves, who experience them as lived memories. She has attempted this multiple times, and failed every time. Except this time, through a combination of making Souma the king and not an easily-removed Prime Minister, and the birth of Liscia, who would grow to be Souma’s strong right arm, it looks like the kingdom is getting a golden age.
• The final arc of Full Metal Panic! reveals that this trope is the motivation of Leonard Testarossa and his allies — their goal is to send the Whisperer Sophia, possessing the body of Kaname Chidori 18 years backwards to prevent the Yamsk 11 incident from happening, which would change the world into one more like Real Life. The moment where it all breaks down is when Sousuke is apparently killed by Leonard and Sophia uses this to persuade Kaname, showing her a reality where Sousuke was an ordinary boy rather than a child soldier. At first Kaname seems happy, but she realizes that he's not the same Sousuke she fell in love with and rejects the plan, refusing to run away from reality even if it means living in a world where Sousuke is dead. Thankfully though, he isn't.

Episode or Character Plots

• In The Adventures of Stefón Rudel, the Brittany region in France got glassed in the last nuclear war, so Stefón travels to the past to avert this.
• Animorphs:
  • In Elfangor's Secret, the team is sent back to prevent Visser Four from changing key events in the past. Unfortunately, those changes were much more far-reaching than either side anticipated, and would've prevented the Holocaust, though likely still making a worse future. So in order to return the present to normal, the team has to essentially condemn millions to death. Eventually they decide on paradoxing out the events of the novel, deciding that at least this way it happened naturally.
  • In In the Time of the Dinosaurs, they must sabotage a nuclear device and sacrifice an entire colony of aliens, or else the Cretaceous Era won't end on schedule.
• Bruce Coville's Book of... Ghosts: Non-time travel variation in Jasper's Ghost — the title character is the ghost of a still-living person and is trying to stop him from carrying out the act that resulted in his death.
• In the Doctor Who Eighth Doctor Adventures series, a long-term story arc involved the Eighth Doctor being manipulated by time-travelling voodoo cult Faction paradox into changing his own history so that the Third Doctor not only becomes aware of the Faction ahead of schedule, but also regenerates on the planet Dust in time to be infected with a Paradox biodata virus that will eventually corrupt him into a member of the Faction. Fortunately, the Doctor's TARDIS senses that something has been changed and takes the infection into itself, essentially preserving the timeline where the Doctor didn't get infected with the virus and sparing the Doctor from being corrupted by the infection until he can take action to stop his third self visiting Dust in the first place.
• In the novel Soon I Will Be Invincible, Lily gets sent back in time to prevent a blight from wiping out humanity, but after she succeeds she decides she liked the blighted future better and becomes a supervillain to try to bring back her original future. However, this turns out to be an outright lie — she's a native of the current time period, although the era she claims as her origin really is a possible future that she has visited — and she ends up using it to trick another supervillain into saving the world.
• In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry and Hermione have the chance to go back and save two innocent lives.
• Lightning features a time-travelling protagonist who goes back to his own time, after having thwarted a Nazi Time Travel plot, and tells Winston Churchill about the Cold War. When he returns to the future, The Cold War never happened, as the Allies kept on pushing eastward after the Nazis surrendered, defeating the communists before the Cold War ever started.
• The short story "Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels' Generous Offer, shows us what would have happened if The Beatles had reunited on Saturday Night Live. Turns out Ringo's a rather inexperienced Time Traveler.
• This is Charles Wallace's mission in A Swiftly Tilting Planet, as the Echthroi have created a Might-Have-Been (a hypothetical timeline that is in the process of supplanting the true timeline) where the world is destroyed by nuclear war. He must discover the source of the chain of events that leads to humanity's destruction and put it right.
• Unusually for Tim Powers, who usually prefers a Stable Time Loop, Three Days to Never has a version of time travel in which it's actually possible to change the past, and several people attempt to make use of it (generally with unpleasant consequences regardless of how noble their motives are).
• Mouse (2017): Bliss was born in a dystopian Pocket Dimension ruled by emotion eaters and has gone back in time to prevent its creation. She's actually gone back many times, each one resulting in a Stable Time Loop and her death, but she hopes that this time she'll be able to break the cycle.
• In the Magic: The Gathering novel Time Streams, Urza and his allies are secretly building a time machine so he can travel thousands of years into the past and prevent the Thran from becoming the monstrously evil Phyrexians. They are then forced to set right a more immediate wrong and stop the Phyrexian spy Kerrick from stealing the plans to Urza's academy and massacring the students and faculty. They succeed at this, but the overstressed time machine explodes, obliterating the academy, killing most of its occupants, and putting a permanent end to Urza's time travel experiments.

---