Is fate fixed… or can a sufficiently cunning person write their own future? Many stories tell us no. A tale first found in the Babylonian Talmud (but possibly much older) concerns two men who traveled to the district of Luz to avoid death—where they met their death. The story reappears in Islamic sources, and eventually in stories by Somerset Maugham and John O’Hara. Trying to elude your fate will only deliver you to it. Indeed, the mythologies of many cultures are filled with stories of people trying and failing to escape prophecy1.
Whether you believe in fate or not, you can still enjoy stories about characters attempting to evade it. There are many such stories. Here are five.
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843)
Scrooge’s relentless pursuit of profit made him rich. In almost every other way, it left him poorer. Too stingy to spend his money, he received little personal benefit from it. He lost his beloved fiancée when she concluded that he loved money more than he loved her. Scrooge has done his very best to alienate every person who might care for him.
It’s never a good sign when spectral figures decide that a sinner demands personal attention. Scrooge is taken on a tour of his past, present, and future to ensure he understands what is waiting for him at the end of the road he chose. Beyond terrorizing an unpleasant old man, is there a point to this?
This famous story is an example of social reform achieved by enlightening the ruling classes. This strategy has always been popular with the bien-pensant folks in power. It is taken for granted that the ruling class has the power to carry out reforms. And, it offers the hope of meaningful change with minimal inconvenience to the powerful. If Dickens had written The 1844 Trial and Execution of the Miser Scrooge By The Workingmen’s Tribunal it would not have been nearly as well received as was A Christmas Carol.
“The Man Outside” by Evelyn E. Smith (1957)
Martin is an unpleasant little boy who will become an unpleasant man. The only significant accomplishment Martin will achieve is to father the man who will give humanity the super-drive. Thanks to the super-drive, humans will escape the solar system and replicate on a far vaster scale the sins of old Earth.
Martin’s great-great-grandson Conrad, having come into possession of a time machine, is determined to protect the galaxy from humans by eliminating the super-drive. Martin’s son being too saintly to consider killing, Conrad’s target is Martin. Conrad’s relatives, eager to protect their existence, embrace the task of protecting Martin. Too bad that Martin’s guardians do not truly understand Conrad’s plan… although cunning Martin does and approves.
As Upton Sinclair observed, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” In the case of all but one of Martin’s descendants, that something is whether it’s bad to brutally exploit aliens or to occasionally sterilize whole worlds. Reform would make them somewhat less rich, hence their willful blind spots.
“A Rose for Ecclesiastes” by Roger Zelazny (1963)
The old Martians were once a great race. Now they seem resigned to sterility, decline and extinction. At least, that’s Gallinger’s impression. This is no casual prejudice on Gallinger’s part: he can see the evidence around him on Mars, and he has mastered ancient Martian languages and can read their texts.
An assignation with a temple priestess results in a quite unexpected pregnancy. Perhaps the infertile Martians can be saved, but only if Gallinger can somehow overcome Martian fatalism. Gallinger is a bold man who is up to the task of transforming an ancient civilization’s worldview. Alternatively, Gallinger is an overconfident fool who does not understand his true role in Martian history.
Rereading this tale, I only now notice parallels between Rose and a late 1980s reimagining of the comic book character Adam Strange from planetary hero to despised but fertile foreigner. I wonder if Zelazny’s story inspired the later retcon?
Mort by Terry Pratchett (1987)
Keenly aware that young Mort was unsuited for the family business, Mort’s father arranged an apprenticeship for Mort. Let Mort’s curiously slender new master worry about Mort’s alarming combination of curiosity and negligible common sense. Just as well for Mort’s father’s equanimity that he cannot see that the person to whom Mort is apprenticed is Death itself.
Death may be the personification of an abstract concept, but even Death does not fully appreciate Mort’s capacity for well-intended catastrophic missteps. Despite learning that mortal fate cannot be changed, Mort prevents Princess Keli’s ordained murder. Keli learns a valuable lesson about fate’s implacability, while Mort will discover unforeseen hazards in being Death’s apprentice.
In Mort’s defense, an utter and comprehensive lack of common sense is in no way unheard of on the Discworld. Indeed, it might be said to be a common malady. One wonders why better coping mechanisms have not yet appeared2.
The Kingdom of Three Duology by Joan He (2022–2024)
The Xin Empire is temporarily divided between three determined warlords: Cicada in the south, Xin Ren to the west, and Miasma ruling over the rest. Amoral Miasma has vast armies, possesses the formal title of Prime Ministress, and is the guardian/jailor of the Empress Xin Bao. Her eventual victory would seem to be assured.
Xin Ren’s strategist3 Rising Zephyr is determined to see her mistress on the throne. The fact that Xin Ren is utterly loyal to Xin Bao and only wishes to see the empress freed from Miasma is but a minor impediment for brilliant, determined Zephyr. That fate has ordained Xin Ren will not prevail is a more serious impediment. Fate cannot be changed. At least, not without a tremendous cost.
One might almost call this duology a romance of three kingdoms, except that the focus isn’t really on romance save as something incompatible with ambition. This book explores what it might take to divert history… even if only for a little while.
Tales of mortals wrestling against fate, whether mundane or divinely ordained, are as old as writing and no doubt much older. These five tales are only a small sample plucked from a very large field. No doubt I’ve overlooked some reader favorites. Feel free to name them in comments below.
- In fact, there’s a rather depressing physics experiment easily performed at home via methods so straightforward I won’t insult you by detailing them here. Pick some random head of state such as American President Huey Long. Travel back before his 1936 victory and shoot him dead. Return to 2025, and you will find that despite your efforts, President John G. Agar took office after winning the 1936 election, just as history has always recorded. Even if you were to try again, perhaps using some subtle poison, it would be futile. President Roosevelt would still be victorious. ↩︎
- To his credit, Mort’s father almost immediately rejects the idea of sending Mort off to magic school, after an interval just long enough to imagine the worst-case scenario of Mort mastering magic. ↩︎
- Each warlord employs strategists, each as brilliant as their expected lifespans are short. One would expect government via genius-by-proxy would function efficiently, without catastrophic civil wars. Oddly, this does not seem to be the case. Perhaps it would be better to select highly educated functionaries via some sort of neutral but generally respected testing system. Has anyone tried that? ↩︎
Ah, good old Waterhouse.
I am not in generally that well informed about visual art but as it happens, I was the exgf’s amanuensis for their papers on the Pre-Raphaelites. I can generally spot a Pre-Raph. In fact, I use as tablet wallpaper a piece by a different Pre-Raph, William Holman Hunt.
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There was a wonderful Waterhouse retrospective at the Royal Academy in London about a decade ago. Photographs do not do these paintings justice. The intensity of the blues in his painting of Circe (one of them) is breathtaking in real life.
And am proud to say that my school can count Dante Gabriel Rossetti as an old boy.
Fritz Lieber’s Try and Change the Past, along with his other Change War stories.
Dune, Messiah and Children of Dune come to mind, of course.
As, indeed, does Dune.
I think the earlier Terminator films and TV series fall into this category. Sarah says “No fate but what we make,” but it seems that everything they try postpones Armageddon a bit at best, rather than stopping it complete,y.
My head-canon was that you can use time travel to change the past, but not so much that it prevents the time traveler from being sent to the past. So, they can change the timing of Skynet’s rise and fall but they can’t prevent either the rise or the fall.
The first movie has a perfect time loop, where sending the terminator back in time results in the conception of John Conner, who causes Skynet to send the terminator back in time… In the first movie, time really can’t be changed. The later movies mess with that concept, sadly.
Terminator Zero has some thoughts on this :D
“The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” suggests itself once again.
In Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Someday This Will All Be Yours, the last survivor of the time wars has established a base at the end of time to ensure that nobody gets up to foolishness with time travel again, and also that the future will be peaceful due to only containing him. When someone arrives from the future to tell him he married and established a new civilization, he sets out to find out who she is sonhe can kill her. Oddly, it turns out she has the same idea about him. Can they prevent there from ever being a future, or will there be another time war?
Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series stars
Galadriel “El” Higgins, whose mother was told when she was an infant, by a seer who is never wrong, that she will be a force of destruction unmatched in the history of wizardry, who will sow destruction upon the Enclaves that protect wizards from supernatural threats and the stifling presence of mundanes. She has spent her life refraining from using the vast destructive spells that come easily to her hand, and never once falling to the temptation of turning to the dark side. The Enclaves are still falling, though…
Not so much trying to prevent prophecy as being annoyed by it: in one iteration, the Legion of Superheroes’ Brainiac Five is tremendously annoyed by Dream Girl’s prophetic dreams. B5 puts in the hard work of thinking his way through problems, only for Dream Girl to wake from a nap with the answers. From his point of view, she’s cheating. After he complains about it to her, she assures him he changes his mind after they get married.
There’s a minor bit in Half A Soul where the protagonist has a vision of herself in a ballgown, abdomen soaked in running blood. At the ball later in the week, she asks a fellow to get her a glass of punch. A dancer stumbles into him, and he spills bright red liquid all over the front of her gown…
Oh, I can’t believe I forgot this one: Jane Gaskell’s The Serpent, whose protagonist Cija was foretold to bring about the doom of her kingdom. Rather than doing what any reasonable parent would do in those circumstances (personally dispose of the kid to avoid the kindly hunter scenario), Cija’s mother keeps Cija fearfully ignorant and locked in a tower. Then Cija’s mother gets the bright idea to marry Cija off to a warlord with orders to murder the man as expeditiously as possible. As Cija has been denied knowledge of many things (like the fact men exist) and is as sharp as a box of used crayons, this plan goes poorly.
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The Altan books were very popular until suddenly they weren’t.
I guess technically Cija becomes a princess of Atlantis at one point but she’s really from a kingdom in South America.
And, of course, there’s Laius of Thebes. He was reliably informed by an oracle that his infant son would kill him and marry his wife (the son’s mother), so he ordered the brat killed. Unfortunately, rather like the huntsman in Snow White, the functionary sent to do the deed has a tender heart, so he spikes the kid through the ankle and leaves him to die; but he is rescued by a shepherd, who names him for his swollen foot: Oedipus. He’s raised to manhood, whereupon he, unknowingly, kills his father and (after an amusing interlude with a sphinx) becomes king of Themes and marries his mother, all unknowingly, having children and generally enjoying life until it becomes clear that Thebes is under a curse. Enquiring of the world’s first trans prophet, Tiresias, he learns that he is the cause of the curse.
The moral of the story seems to be, don’t fuck around with prophets and oracles. They always get the last word.
Or, alternatively – make sure you don’t hire any tender-hearted henchmen.
There’s a reason why the word we use to describe trying and failing to fight fate is from the Greek.
The Einstein Gun has a German-Jewish protagonist determined to prevent the Emperor Franz Ferdinand from making Adolf Hitler the Austro-Hungarian Chancellor in 1936, by altering history so that Franz Ferdinand is successfully assassinated back in 1914. The protagonist expects that if he succeeds he will find himself in an alternate 1936, back in his home town of Dachau.
To judge from our history books, he did indeed succeed, and find himself in his hometown…
Ben Elton’s Time and Time Again plays with the same theme, but efforts to change history are made with each alteration. Hitler’s Germany was actually one of the more benign outcomes, and the alternate histories produced by subsequent meddling got steadily worse.
There was that whole season of Doctor Who angsting about the inevitability that the Doctor was DOOMED TO DIE because it had been observed and was a “fixed point in time”. Then, towards the end of the season, they showed a shapeshifter. [*sigh*] Did that end the angsting? No, it did not.
I am surprised that no one has mentioned the granddaddy of these stories: Heinlein’s By Your Bootstraps, or his All You Zombies. The movie of the latter – Predestinaton – is arguably even better than the story.
Then there are various Ted Chiang stories. The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate could be considered a direct descendant of the Arabian tale already mentioned. And of course Story of Your Life and its movie adaptation Arrival.
Particularly enjoyed the footnotes this week
Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne by R. A. Lafferty beautifully illustrates footnote 1.
“This famous story is an example of social reform achieved by enlightening the ruling classes.”
🙄 think I sprained something
This may be the worst review of A Christmas Carol I have ever read.