The possibility of changing the present is never so alluring as when it comes about by changing the past. There’s a certain poetry to time travel. In the place of the hard, incremental work of effecting change in reality—calling your senator, voting, drinking detox tea, and then waiting—you get to see your impact appear in an instant, fully formed, functional, for better or worse. You get to find out how it ends. You get to see time unspool before your eyes and then knit itself back together again, hopefully better, hopefully brighter, hopefully overflowing with cheese groves.
