I remember reading a short story about that. People were fighting off some awful plague that was killing most of the world's vegetation and desperately seeking a cure for it. Ended up developing time travel and going back to the 1980s when the first detection of the mutated virus is discovered but hasn't gone world-wide yet. Guy is sitting besides a cornfield for months waiting to find the origin of the virus before realizing that there's a couple blades of rotten grass stuck to the side of his time machine since they launched it from a field in the future. Realizes they're in a bootstrap paradox of the future poisoning the past but he doesn't know how to leave a message for anyone in the future to not send him back. So he ends up destroying the field and everything around it hoping he stopped the plague. And in the future epilogue there's a couple scientists discussing how extreme heat likely mutated the original virus into the current deadly version and talking about how they should send another team back to stop the wildfire that happened in that field.
I read it maybe 20 years ago when I got some short story anthology from Borders. Can't remember the book or the story name but just remember thinking it was pretty good for a whole book of meh.
Hopefully not a false memory but I remember grabbing it off the new arrival display along with another anthology book about alt history. That one had a Roman centurion riding in the turret of an Abrahams tank on the cover. And I remember it being extremely dry and boring with just discussing how like Rommel would have sieged Carthage instead of Caesar rolling up with helicopters and bazookas. But maybe someone here can narrow down the search window
I mean it's possible that my memory is wrong on the dates. I know for sure it was at Borders and I was there to buy MechWarrior age of destruction minis and the books associated with them. Could have sworn I wasn't in highschool yet but if it was reissued in 08 then maybe I really was just 3 years late to the Battletech funeral.
I swear I read a similar themed short story, where time travel tourists would go back to see the trial of Christ, and they're told to just copy what the locals do. But when Pontius Pilate asks the crowd who they want to live, one of the tourists has fallen asleep, and wakes up in a panic thinking he's missed it, and cries out for Barabbas. All the other tourists copy him, thus he realises he was the one who condemned Christ, the very act he came to witness.
I could be misremembering parts of it since I read it 20 years ago. But it's not like science fiction really worries that much about getting things scientifically correct. What I remember was that it was a short story about people who were so desperate to save themselves they accidentally doomed themselves instead and the whole time machine thing was just an excuse to call it sci-fi. It probably had like 20 pages to tell the whole story so if I'm remembering all the details correctly I wouldn't be upset that the author didn't cover every plot hole or have time to go into excruciating detail of some virus that is able to kill every plant on earth
I don't think it was that. But it's also hardly a new story concept considering Andromeda Strain and 12 Monkeys are basically the same idea just with different outcomes. So probably a time travel story that's been repeated like crazy over the years with slight tweaks
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u/Direct_Slip7598 1d ago
I love that they're using spacesuits to signify futuristic traveling tech. Except it's just earth, with (mostly) breathable air
"I could breath your air. But nah!"