"Nazism...could not have come to power in the country of Bach and Goethe, except through the unique genius of Adolf Hitler. And Hitler's father had been...illegitimate, result of a chance affair...
"But if you headed off that liaison, which you could easily have done without harming anybody..." (Time Patrol, p. 424)
"...The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 came near failing. Only the energy and genius of Lenin pulled it through. What if you traveled to the nineteenth century and quietly, harmlessly prevented Lenin's parents from ever meeting each other?" (p. 672)
P. 250 presents a list of such pivotal individuals:
Genghis Khan
Oliver Cromwell
V.I. Lenin
Gautama Buddha
Kung Fu-Tze
Paul of Tarsus
Muhammad ibn Abdallah
Aristotle
Galileo
Newton
Einstein
I confess to not recognizing one of these names.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Was it "Shalmaneser" you did not recognize? The most famous of the five Assyrian kings who bore that name was Shalmaneser V, the conqueror of Israel. Was his destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel considered a pivotal event by the Time Patrol?
Sean
Sean,
Yes, Shalmaneser. Rereading to blog, I pause on every detail and learn a lot.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Thought so! I'm trying to copy your method while rereading FLANDRY TO TERRA. That is, trying to think of pausing and taking note of small, but interesting details. I've noticed things in "A Message in Secet" that I don't think I paid attention to in past readings of the story.
Sean
Kaor, Paul!
Would you be offended if I asked you to cite the names of the stories you quote from? And not just the page numbers? My preference for hard covers can make it hard to look up texts when only page numbers from soft covers are used.
Apologetically, Sean
Sean,
I will from now on. In this case, the p. 672 quote is from "The Year Of The Ransom"; the p. 424 quote is from "The Sorrow Of Odin The Goth."
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Many thanks! And these two quotes are fascinating. What kind of world would we have seen if Lenin and Hitler had never been born? Better or worse? I would like to think it would have been better, but we don't know!
Sean
Aside from preventing those two births, perhaps WWI could have been made less catastrophic if the Gallipolli campaign had worked better for the British. Not neccessarily an overwhelming British victory but good enough that some concessions to the Turks would have got them to accept neutrality & allowing Allied shipping through the straits. My understanding is that a British/Anzac corp grabbing a hill above the beaches before some Turks got there would have put the Turks in a much weaker position.
In such a case I could see Allied success on the Eastern Front leading to early allied victory, no 'stab in the back' myth, perhaps in Russia someone like Kerensky setting up a constitutional monarchy.
Another 'what if' of the early 20th century is the Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen, developed in 1905. Without that for making fertilizer & munitions the Central Powers couldn't have kept fighting for more than a few months.
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