The best time travel novels with characters who intentionally try to change history

Stephen King has written one of the longest—over 800 pages—and best thought out time travel novels.

When Jake Epping discovers a portal back to 1958, he realizes he can travel back and forth from the past to the present and whenever he returns to the past it will always be the same day in 1958. At first, he tries to change events that affect people he knows, but eventually he realizes if he stays in the past long enough, he can prevent the Kennedy assassination.

He believes the future will then be better, including the Vietnam War being prevented. After several failed attempts to remain in the past, he eventually manages to stop Kennedy’s assassination, but the results are not what he expects.

Diana Gabaldon has written a whole series of long books—the Outlander series.

My favorite of these is the second novel, Dragonfly in Amber, in which the events from the first novel culminate in Clare and Jamie trying to prevent the Battle of Culloden in 1745. Jamie and Clare work tirelessly to help Bonnie Prince Charlie and his forces, though they know historically the Jacobites are doomed.

Their efforts are not intended to place Charles Stuart on the throne that is rightfully his so much as to prevent the destruction of the Scottish soldiers. As a result, they are forced to make some very difficult decisions and even hurt people they care about who do not understand their actions.

Kindred is more subtle than other novels in its main character’s efforts to change the past.

Dana, an African American woman, finds she has time-traveled back to the antebellum South where she witnesses the brutalities of slavery. However, she also realizes the plantation she is on is populated not only by her slave ancestors, but that the white owners are also her ancestors.

She finds herself forced to protect the slaveowner’s son, Rufus, even though she dislikes him, from accidental deaths, because he is her ancestor. In bonding with Rufus, Dana seeks to educate him about the wrongs of slavery to make the lives of her slave ancestors easier.

The novel raises an awareness of slavery and asks poignant questions about how to atone for the past.

This novel may seem an odd choice since King Arthur is likely more fictional than historical, yet Mark Twain, for all his humor, uses the novel as a satire upon the wrongs of capitalism and his late nineteenth-century society.

Hank Morgan, the Connecticut Yankee, intentionally tries to change history by making medieval England a better place. He does this by trying to rid the land of superstition and the hold that charlatans like Merlin have over the country, but he is also a complex character who is not unwilling to use medieval superstition to his advantage.

By the end of the novel, he has turned medieval England into a medieval version of the nineteenth-century complete with modern inventions including the bicycle and telephone. However, the most memorable scene occurs when Hank and King Arthur travel the country in disguise and end up enslaved and nearly hanged.

The experience causes King Arthur to end slavery.

Mark Twain’s King Arthur time travel novel led to numerous others.

While Twain’s novel is more of a veiled attempt to depict his own time, other authors have depicted Camelot as a utopian place and asked what the world would be like if it had not fallen. In The Forever King, a young boy, Arthur Blessing, turns out to be a reincarnated King Arthur. He travels back in time to Camelot to try to restore its past glory.

He failed in the past, but with the help of the Holy Grail, he is determined not to fail again. The novel led to two sequels. Like all these time travel novels, the goal is to change the past to create a better future. But utopias are always hard to achieve.