I am trying to work on an idea of a novel in which four persons come back from 2060 to 2001 to stop 9/11. They hack into the airline computers and cancel the booking of all the terrorists. They watch the terrorists leave the airports and kill them. But 9/11 still happens exactly the way it originally happened. What are the possible explanations for it?
Hello Shafqat. Easy; one of the four was a plant, his grandfather was actually a member of the atrocity committing terrorist group (with which he half sympathised but thought a little over the top what with the tower razings, the many dead, and all). That aside, he didn't want him forgotten—especially now he'd died prior to his sins. So, being a hacker, it was easy for him to take a copy of the 2060s internet (which held the historical footage) on a 2060s pen drive with him on the journey back in time. Its contents protected and isolated from the history realignment forces attempting to penetrate the sovivium hull of the time machine—especially necessary for the return leg—once they'd committed their doings. And given all history books were destroyed in the great war of 2036 (mustn't forget that), he stopped off (toilet break excuse) round about this time. < With the world still in disarray he snuck out of the loos to a conveniently working 'net kiosk', uploaded the now fake history, and overwrote the original. Bingo, on returning to the 60s, the world believed the event had actually taken place. Only a few shrewd folk knew for sure, but they were discounted as conspiracy theory wackos. < That story can be the sequel.
The conspiracy lies deeper than they originally anticipated. There were more people involved than the future was aware of... ie: the terrorists had a back up plan in place. A fail-safe. A "B team" in place to step up/in as needed. They simply didn't have to initiate it. Those unknown terrorists died as "victims" never having to make themselves known. If it isn't important to your story that it takes place exactly as before... you could play around with it a bit more... a bit of a trial and error as your protagonist attempts to piece things together. Just my thoughts...
This is an obvious choice. Not a bad one, but I rarely like to take the obvious route. Another choice I think is an obvious plot line is that you have two travelers supposedly on the same team, but one is a traitor with a mission to make sure the other fails. Or you could have an opposing team follow your hero team to the past. Or have that opposing team already in the past and waiting on your heroes to show.
When the team went back in time, they actually went to an alternate timeline where it wasn't those people who were the terrorists, it was someone else.
Time travel screws with quantum events, i.e. surprise events, freak things that play out at exactly the moment time travel happens. Now the original team watch the terrorists leave, but another team goes back in time for something else (i.e. Rasputin having been a rogue time traveller) at the exact moment they are trying to convince the airport authorities that those four are terrorists, and, instead of believing the original time travellers, the airport authorities arrest them instead for forged documentation, erasing the timeline the original team succeeded. Messed up enough? ETA: Borrowed the quantum idea from 'Thrice Upon A Time', J.P. Hogan
None, unless they did so in an alternate branch of reality. The idea of alternate realities are nonsense from a physicist's POV. If an alternative decision is taken it branches off into an impossible to reach alternative. That reality may play out elsewhere but is is not some mirror reality, it fucked off somewhere else.
It's not bad to take the obvious option. You've definitely got to spin it so that it's new and fresh though.
The terrorists "Plan B" may have been hacking into and taking over the planes remotely (yeah, not feasible, but in scifi anything is possible) guiding them into the towers. Or, 9/11 had happened completely differently - including the plane that crashed into the field originally making it to its destination- but the time travelers had changed it to the current situation by their actions, not knowing they really did change the past because their memories of the event changed as well. The original timeline may have been much, much worse. You could show the readers how bad the original timeline had been, and as awful as 9/11 was the new timeline is a better option.
I'd go with branching timeline theory, because it's a way to travel back in time that wouldn't cause the feedback loop. The reason you went there still exists but if you travel back to your time after a completed/failed mission, you have to choose between undoing everything by searching home using quantum entangled particles (Bohr's theory which is now resonably proven using lasers) or jumping into a world where the same people cannot have been born again because of randomness in gene mixing (Chaos theory). You're not really creating a new time-line because it was already decided that it would happen, just like all the other possible events.
Another option would be to just have things happen as you want them to, without any explanation, the way Stephen King did in 11/22/63.
With the sole exception that I know of — the short story All You Zombies, by Heinlein — all time travel stories are conceptually and logically loopy. This includes King’s novel 11/22/63, which, while entertaining, is a complete logical botch. It is logically possible to travel to the past, though of course it may not be physically possible to do. What you CANNOT do is travel to the past, and also change it. See: The Paradoxes of Time Travel, by David Lewis. Also Google work by the philosopher Norman Swartz on this subject.
With 9/11 thwarted, 2060 ends up being a terrible place. So another team is put together in 2060 to travel back in time and ensure that 9/11 takes place once more.
Aliens have a mission to "save humanity" - they do this by finding these events, then teleporting in and replacing the casualties with equivalent corpses (and remote controls on the planes) . (so it is an alien abduction - but to save you from the catastrophe) Our time traveler comes back and 9/11 still happens (because history says it did) and now the foiled terrorists go on to do other atrocities It was a one way trip (He thought it was worth the sacrifice) - now he hides and when hang out till 2050 - where he finds himself in highschool and tells him "Don't go back in time, it just hurts things"
I like the idea of having others also meddling in the timeline, perhaps in different timelines that the original characters, maybe much later. It could be a logical reason, perhaps one of the people who died in the attacks was meant to kick off another world war, so letting 9-11 happen is the better of two evils. It could also be a sort of pollution clean up much later in the timeline. You know how we facepalm at how archaeologists a hundred years ago handled the treasures of ancient Egypt? Who's to say we wouldn't make a similar mess of the timeline and leave it for future generations to sort out. Imagine future generations can recognize when the past has been changed and go back and fix it. Imagine waking up tomorrow speaking latin and wearing a toga, but having the knowledge that something was wrong. "Wasn't I speaking a different language yesterday? I don't remember being Roman, lets take a look at the time logs. Ugh, some idiot killed Caesar when he was a child and Rome never collapsed, let's just fix that."
Maybe, in the midst of trying to stop it, they could be mistaken for the terrorists, and, while 9/11 is stopped, the succeeding events, including the Iraq War, still happen, and your MCs are subjected to the same tortures as Abu Ghraib prisoners were, making the overall point of the story about the atrocities that happened after 9/11. I dunno. Completely different than you said, but might be an interesting twist, depending on the moral of your story.
