📚 Finished reading 11.22.63 by Stephen King.

Jake Epping, a down-on-his-luck teacher, is recruited by a friend to kill Lee Harvey Oswald before he gets a chance to kill President J. F. Kennedy.

Why? His friend, Al, believes that if JFK had survived then the world would now be a much better place, not least because his practice of politics may have meant that the Vietnam War would never have happened.

Get rid of one wretched waif, buddy, and you could save millions of lives.

And how, given the book is set in relatively modern times, 2011? Well, as luck would have it, Al has discovered a strange portal in a corner of a diner. Walking through it leaves you in the same geographic location in the year 1958.

You can return back to modernity as and when you want. And no matter how long you spent in the past-times world, it’s only 2 minutes later when you come back to 2011. But it might be a totally different 2011 if you did something in the past that had substantial repercussions.

We know that Kennedy was shot in 1963. So Jake has a few years to get accustomed to discretely living in the past, to learn how the world used to work. Unfortunately for him, the past has a way of resisting changes to the original timeline. You might plan to do something that was never done in the 1960s only to be inexplicably diverted, distracted or incapacitated en-route. This tendency is not infallible, the past can change in some ways, but it’s not entirely straightforward.

A further complication is of course the mystery surrounding the JFK assassination. In our world there are plenty of people out there who do not believe Oswald was the real assassin, or at least not the sole person involved. These people include the large majority of Americans in a 2001 poll.

Would killing Oswald in cold blood really stop JFK being assassinated? Especially if not only is there a decent chance that he wasn’t the sole operator involved, but also that tendency of the the past to exert mysterious forces in the direction of recreating its original timeline.

Jake is not a natural murderer. Understandably he wants some certainty that there is some point to conducting this operation before committing such an alien act.

Of course that’s not the only unknown. Sure, Al believes JFK staying alive long would have dramatically improved the world. But would it really? Would there be no cost to pay at all? Few people would feel certain about that, and Jake is no stranger to doubt. So many time travel stories have conveyed to us the idea that altering the past could have intended consequences for the future.

Furthermore, living in any community for several years means you’ll struggle not to build up a lifestyle, habits and human relationships that might be hard to put aside for a small chance of possibly doing something that may or may not make the future a bit better. That’s even if you could navigate your way through an alien world that resists your every attempt to change it so as to be in the right place at the right time to put a potentially huge dent into standard-timeline history.

Well, I’m pleased to say that a mere 800ish pages later you’ll find out what Jake thought and did. Yes, it is a mammoth tome, so long that had it not come with such a strong recommendation I doubt I’d have considered starting it. But the recommendation was a good one. It was over long before I could ever have gotten bored of it.