Copyright � 2026 by Shane
Tourtellotte
Strewn throughout most of this book are advisories and warnings about not doing anything that would alter the course of history as we know it (with an emphasis on “as we know it”). The concern is less with having the present day turn into some nightmare contortion of itself1 than with starting a paradox loop that gets broken only by something happening to break you. You don’t want that happening. I don’t want that happening. Let’s see that it doesn’t happen.
My part of that bargain is to write a chapter about the things you should avoid doing, so you don’t send history down a new course that it cannot correct. Much of it will be common sense; much of it will be things I’ve already mentioned, but am gathering here for emphasis and convenient review. All of it deserves serious consideration.
1. Thou Shalt Not Kill
Simple enough, right? Don’t kill anybody. Don’t kill anybody who has children. Don’t kill anybody who could have children in the future.
The reasons are obvious. Ending someone’s life prematurely is a big timeline change. Depriving children, even adult children, of a parent is a life-altering event. Worse than either is preventing future lives from running any part of their course. Infant mortality was bad in previous eras, but not remotely bad enough that you should count on it to pull your fat out of this fire.
I’ve mentioned the wisdom of carrying non-lethal weapons on multiple occasions, and I reiterate it now. You need the tools to defend yourself, but keep it within bounds. If you have any means of avoiding a lethal showdown, use them. This includes being, or at least playing, the utter coward and chickening out of any fight that looks like it could be to the death. I don’t care how badly your self-regard is wounded. It’s better than leaving yourself at the mercy of how a paradox loop randomly resolves itself. It’s also better than getting killed in that fight.
2. No Littering
This stretches into figurative territory, but it starts out literal. (Pun unintended.) The gear you packed for your time journey assuredly included items that are anachronisms in the time you picked to visit2. Leave any of it behind after your visit, and you’re giving people a chance to stumble across it and ask disruptive questions. You may no longer be there to be disrupted by them, but the timeline will. This includes things you may think you’ve properly disposed of as refuse. Trash middens and garbage dumps may not be popular or preferred places to scavenge, but it does happen. A plastic bottle or piece of discarded electronics fished from there will be at least as dangerous to the timeline, maybe even more so.
In short, treat this like a camping trip with an added dimension, and pack out your trash!
It is not only physical things that you need to worry about leaving behind. Anachronistic knowledge left in the wrong place poses at least as great a threat. You might consider it an honor and a kindness to tell Leonardo da Vinci or Charles Babbage that technology he imagined but could not produce will be lauded as genius ahead of its time by future eras that did produce it. That’s great. What will they now do with that knowledge?
They might give up all that striving and imagining, knowing it would come to nothing by their hands. They might redouble their efforts, knowing their ideas could be made reality. I would personally bet on the latter: knowing something can be done is a long step toward getting it done, or at least believing you personally will get it done. Either way, you could throw them far off their historical course, and it’s not worth that just to give them a little moral support.
The example holds with the obscure as well as the famous. Who knows what hidden genius might be inspired if you brag a little too much about the wonders you’ve known where you come from? Granted, some leaps are too great. You’re not going to jolt someone in first-century Rome into inventing the light bulb. But the steam engine, one that might actually catch on? That’s a danger3.
I’ve said before that you need to compartmentalize your mind to deal with the realities of the past times you’re visiting. This includes what you send out, as well as what you take in.
3. History, at Arm’s Length
You want to be right there when it happens, the big event that rings down the corridors of time. Why wouldn’t you, given this opportunity? My answer is, because you might get so close to history in the making that you become an inextricable part of that history.
You want to watch the Wright Brothers’ first flights? You can’t be so close to the Wright Flyer that you wind up in that famous picture of it in flight. That itself might not shift the timeline so much, but that wouldn’t be the only effect. Curious people decades later would try to find out something about that stranger with Wilbur and Orville, that tangent line to history. Their researches would hit a fast dead end, as if the person never really existed. It would become a celebrated mystery, altering history by being an inexplicable incident of history. Heck, some people would end up claiming you were a time-traveler.
If I cannot appeal to your concern for the timeline, at least consider the danger to your own neck. Many of the interesting points of history are violent. Violence seldom restricts itself to formal boundaries. Get an inch too close to the Boston Massacre, and you may find yourself catching a redcoat’s fire. Where is that last fatal inch? You won’t know, and nobody is going to tell you.
Time travel carries unavoidable risks, risks you’ve already decided to accept and assume if you’re making the voyage. Adding avoidable risk for an added increment of excitement is an equation with a lot of unknowable variables. Err on the side of keeping your trip safe, at least so you’re still around to make the next trip.
4. No Sex, Please
This is going to disappoint a whole lot of readers. Too bad. Somebody has to tell you not to be led astray by your fantasies and your glands, and today that’s me.
Guys, time travel is not a license for sowing wild oats. Sex with women4 of the past doesn’t bring less trouble, but more. The most obvious trouble is, well, the most obvious trouble. Fathering a child who didn’t exist originally is a big, dangerous change. Maybe you’ll hope for a miscarriage or a death in infancy as the timeline tries to set itself back on track. Don’t. Getting lucky in one sense does not carry over into the other sense, not that I would call that luck. Also, the child you sire on her may displace another child she would have had, multiplying the timeline damage and the chances of a paradox loop.
Gals, I’ve let you feel smug about sexual paradoxes before, but not this time. The perils in your case aren’t as great, but they do exist. I’m not speaking so much about your affair with Julius Caesar getting you in the family way. That’s a problem you’ll presumably bring home with you, so the timeline is not jeopardized. I’m talking about the changes to Caesar’s sexual history, perhaps expending the spermatozoon on you that otherwise would have gotten Cleopatra pregnant5. The principle stands for less famous men, perhaps even more so since you wouldn’t have even vague historical records of when they were impregnating someone. Whoever the potential father, subtracting someone from history is even more perilous than adding someone. I urge you to shun the risk.
Guys and gals, there’s a further hazard to sex in the past: venereal diseases. Contracting something in the past and bringing it to the present would be bad enough, especially if it’s something that modern medicine hasn’t had to contend with6. The bigger worry is what you might take to the past and spread around. Yes, that’s insulting, and I don’t care. Time-travelers are self-selected for reckless, high-risk behaviors, so the assumption fits. You could bring along a small crate of condoms, yes, but an anachronistic introduction of them to, say, medieval France carries its own hazards7.
I’ve spoken so far of the sexual perils of traveling to the past. They also exist for trips to the future, and this time the risks are swapped. Men fathering children a hundred years from now is less of a peril than women bringing back children in utero. That baby, just by existing, will disrupt the timeline toward the future you visited, altering it in unpredictable ways that could make it materially different, thus commencing a paradox loop. Even if that baby doesn’t do so, it may displace another child the mother might have had, and as I’ve noted, subtracting is even worse than adding. To this, we may add the prospects of catching a future venereal disease, especially some new strain that present-day medicine cannot handle.
In short, when it comes to sex, don’t face the peril. It’s too perilous.
Footnotes:
Those of you in the back rows snickering “How could you tell?” need to settle down. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but settle down.
This is primarily true for visiting the past. Older items brought to the future are far more likely to be dismissed rather than scrutinized.
Rome had the general concept of a steam engine, but those practical people never considered it a practical item. Why go through all the drudgery of making such a thing when it couldn’t do anything slave labor couldn’t do, and cheaper?
Yes, I’m going to assume heterosexual activity. That has more and greater perils to it, at least to the timeline.
Or some more obscure woman. Julius Caesar got around. A lot.
The intensely humiliating interview with public health authorities should itself be a deterrent. “Well, we met in Carthage. I don’t think he/she is alive any more, but you could try contacting one of his/her several hundred thousand descendants ….”
Or it might actually explain some things. I’ll have to do more research.
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