Wednesday, April 08, 2015

Book Idea

Every now and again I have a dream or a thought pops in my head that is the smallest grain of an idea for a book.  Sometimes I chase that concept down the rabbit hole and come up with a formulated synopsis or even the vaguest of plots.  However, most just end with me shrugging the entire thing into oblivion, never to be revisited again, which normally comes after watching an episode of Mad Men or a great movie and realizing my level of writing is nowhere near adequate enough to make it to bookshelves.
 
There is one idea I've had in my back pocket for about a year now that I have not yet been discouraged enough to drop.  I have even gone so far as to write out a couple of chapters, only to be thwarted by a busy work schedule or hectic family life, but in all reality it will never likely be completed.

Ordinarily I wouldn't take the time to blog about these book ideas because they ultimately will not go anywhere, but for some reason I had a dream the other night about a time travel story that I thought was interesting and I don't know that it has ever been done before in a way that gained popular traction.  I'm sure this notion has made it into a book or television episode as some point in history, but as far as I know I haven't seen it.

The dream in question was about a group who discovers a way to travel back in time and after fiddling with the most popular uses of time travel, such as making lots of money and changing past decisions in minor ways to have a better life in the present without completely rearranging things that would create a time paradox (are you lost yet Joanna), the team decides to make major historical changes to better mankind.  I haven't ironed out all the details as to what they would do in the past, but the third act would be assassinating a dictator that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

Okay, you might be thinking this sounds very common in time travel stories as every science fiction writer and their dog have created a story about going back in time to stop Oswald from assassinating President Kennedy or killing Hitler some time prior to his reign of Germany, but what makes mine a little different is that it would be of a ruler that nobody has ever heard of.  It would be a fictional dictator of some real civilization and the final chapters of the book would see the group planning and executing the project to stop this fabricated madman.

My Twilight Zone ending for the story would be that once they accomplish their task in the past, by returning to the present they learn of a new person named Adolf Hitler that never existed in the previous timeline and by executing one madman who had caused the killing of less than one million people it led to the ultimate birth of a worse madman who caused the killing of more than six million.  By tampering with a previous timeline that we believe doesn't exist, they created the current timeline we are living now and have no knowledge of ever having had a different course of events.

Like I have said before, I won't do anything with this idea, but I feel like there is just enough there to make it interesting for a Syfy TV movie or paperback adventure story found on a Half-Price Bookstore shelf.

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