1 August 2018 (Serifos, Greece) – George Nikolopoulos is a speculative fiction writer from Greece, and he has written a fair amount of poetry. His stories have been published in Galaxy’s Edge, Factor Four, Best Vegan SFF 2016 and many other places. His work is quite popular. In his early high school days his biggest inspiration was Anatole France, and after that he read almost all of Ursula K. Le Guin, Douglas Adams, J.R.R. Tolkien, Roger Zelazny, among many others. Currently he’s hooked on George R.R. Martin.
Here is his latest. At the end I included a few bits of an interview with him on his inspiration for the piece:
Going back for Hitler
The perils of time travel
Killing Hitler has long been the Holy Grail of time travellers. Every now and again some determined soul goes back in time to try, but all fail. It seems that Lady Time is fiercely protective of her strands and our actions are but proverbial ripples in the pond.
I may be young and frowned upon by my supposedly more knowledgeable colleagues, but I sincerely believe I have found the solution in Doctor Jablonski’s papers. Entropy diligently thwarts those who actively attempt to change the past, he proposed, but if one goes with the flow, so to speak, they might be able to act in small ways, thereby precipitating big changes.
As most time travellers realize, this is clearly an impossible situation. If you go back in time with the express purpose of changing the past, you will most definitely do it willingly. That’s where my own humble contribution lies, and that’s why I will succeed where everyone else has failed. I’m just about to erase my memories and travel back in time innocent as a newborn babe.
I have read everything about the monster. I know all his crimes and all his atrocities by heart; you could even say that I have brainwashed myself. It’s all burnt into my mind, so deep that even after wiping my memory clean some vestige will remain, buried in the recesses of my unconscious. I won’t even know that I come from the ‘future’, but I will be subconsciously drawn to him and — although oblivious of the reason — I will hate him enough to kill him.
I know the price to pay; unaware that there’s a present to go back to, I will remain stranded in the past, a hapless amnesiac. This will not stop me; my sense of purpose is so strong that I would gladly sacrifice everything to succeed.
I sit in the time machine’s seat and strap myself in. I set the timer to go off in ten minutes. Off to 1913, a reasonable choice, as he should be much easier to kill before he comes to power, and I don’t think I could bring myself to kill a child. I inject myself with the memory-wiping serum — and then I wait. And I wait.
A blinding light. Where am I? Who am I?
*****
Standing on an open field next to a wide road, the wind ruffling my hair, I can’t remember who I am but I know I have a glorious purpose in life. It feels both frightening and exhilarating.
I hear a faint moaning sound from down the road and I move towards it. The road turns abruptly to the left to cross a thicket of trees. As I enter the wood, I see an overturned automobile. One of the wheels lies a little farther down the road; it must have come off as the car turned the bend.
The moaning comes from inside the car. Filled with apprehension, I open the door to see a young man lying in a pool of blood. There’s an ugly wound in his left temple.
“Water, please,” he whispers when he sees me.
“I’m sorry, I have none,” I tell him. “Try to hang on, I’ll go for help.”
He clasps my hand. “I’m going to Munich,” he says. He coughs blood. “I’m a painter.” He’s struggling to speak; then his eyes roll and he dies.
I rummage through his sack and find his papers. His name was Adolf Hitler.
I say it loudly. It has a nice ring to it; it even sounds vaguely familiar.
There’s money in his wallet. I put it in my pocket. On a whim, I also take his papers. I lacked a name and now I have one. A name and a sense of purpose. I have a feeling that people will talk about me in years to come.
As I say the name again, weird, unnatural, terrible visions come unbidden to my mind. Is this to be my destiny? I shiver with fear — or anticipation.
* * * * *
The story behind the story: “Going back for Hitler” (excerpts from an interview with George Nikolopoulos):
I’ve always been both fascinated and repulsed by time-travel stories, mostly because of the paradox, or should I say the paradoxes, because there’s more than one.
One paradox is that if you travel back in time to change events that happened before you were born, then there are millions of ways to prevent you from ever being born, and so who was it that went back to change history? And if you’re going back to the future after the deed, to what future will you return? One way to solve this issue is to assume that by going back in time and making changes you’re just creating a new time strand, one that is free to take a new course onward. So, when you return to your own future nothing at all will have changed, but just by going back you have created a new parallel universe. Of course there’s also a theory that all conceivable universes already exist, so in fact your sojourn in time has accomplished nothing.
But the most disconcerting paradox is the ‘neat’ solution. If, as happens in many time-travel stories and most time-travel films, everything finally fits together so neatly that travelling back to the past was what actually made the present happen, then this means that either there’s no past or future and everything happens simultaneously, which is something very hard for the human mind to comprehend, to say the least, or that there’s no free will and everything has been preordained since the beginning of time, which is more than a little depressing.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I woke up one morning with not one but two fully formed stories in my mind, about time travellers who go back to kill the most infamous villain of all time — but with a different twist each. I think of them as ‘twin’ stories, though they are completely independent of each other [he refers to an earlier story titled “You can always change the past” wherein the time traveller kills the wrong Adolf Hitler]. I’m very proud for both of them. I have, in fact, overcome my aversion to time-travel stories, so there’s a possibility I might even go on to write a whole series of mini-‘going-back-to-kill-Hitler’ stories with different outcomes.