Times where someone attempts to Make Wrong What Once Went Right in Literature.
- This was once a plot point in Animorphs, with a villain getting hold of the Time Matrix and trying to alter human history so Earth would be easier for the Yeerks to conquer. The book in question starts in a version of Earth where he succeeded. He did, however, sometimes suffer a minor inconvenience during his travels when changes he had already made prevented him from being in the right place at the right time - like when he went to kill Einstein, but Einstein had never come to America, or give the Nazi's a victory at D-day, but only to find out that Nazi Germany never even existed.
- In Bearing an Hourglass, Satan tries to trick Chronos into stopping Zane from attempting suicide, which would undo the events of the previous novel. Then, demons follow Chronos on his trips through time and screw with history.
- In the Clark Ashton Smith short story "The Chain of Aforgomon", a man invokes a powerful demon in order to relive his happiest hour with his dead beloved through Mental Time Travel. Not only does he mar that perfect memory by accidentally offending her in a way that he previously hadn't, but it forever bars them from the Reincarnation Romance that they were fated to have, since their timelines are thrown an hour out of sync.
- Jack Chalker's Downtiming the Nightside is about a temporal war where conditions in the present whipsaw back and forth as victories alternate between the side that wants to Make Wrong What Once Went Right and the side that wants to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
- In The Extraordinaires, the last surviving Neanderthals plan to travel back in time and wipe out homo sapiens before humans become numerous and powerful enough to challenge the Neanderthals.
- Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South. Time traveling racist Afrikaners aid the Confederacy so it wins The American Civil War, hoping to create a strong ally that advocates white power. It starts going Off the Rails when they can't arrive until 1864 (after the first black regiments distinguished themselves), prominent Confederates like Robert E. Lee begin moving to take steps to weaken slavery, and then enters into Nice Job Fixing It, Villain when they try to use blackmail and violence to get what they want, turning the Confederates completely against them.
- Kid Chaos, a supervillain in the history of Lair For Rent, was a self-professed time traveller who came from a utopic future that he wanted to prevent because it was boring.
- Lightning. Nazis try to change history so they can win World War II. However, there's a twist: they're not Nazis from the future traveling to the past, as one might expect. They're Nazis from the past (i.e., a Nazi scientist in 1940 or so actually invented the time machine) traveling to the future to figure out how they lost and bring back information and other stuff to help them win. That twist feeds into an interesting case of Set Right What Once Went Wrong when the protagonists tell Winston Churchill about the Cold War, an action that means the Allies keep on pushing east, driving the Soviets of the map in Eastern Europe, preventing that long conflict from ever taking place.
- James P. Hogan's The Proteus Operation has this, with malevolent time-travelers from the future giving Hitler nuclear weapons. The book begins in the 1970s, with the US, Canada, and Australia as the only parts of the world still resisting Hitler. They then find out about the whole time travel thing, and build their own machine to Set Right What Once Went Wrong. It turns out that in the original timeline, Hitler never even came to power. The Americans don't stop Hitler from starting World War II, but they do stop him from getting nukes. The end result is our history, where Hitler rose to power, but was defeated.
- The Relativity villain Phanthro likes to alter history in devastating ways for his own amusement.
- In The Secrets of Supervillainy (part of the The Supervillainy Saga), President Omega is from a utopian future of superheroes and super-science that travels back in time to do this. He finds the future so boring that he wants to wreck it by helping the Nazis win in WW2 as well as destroying the Age of Superheroes.
- In Soon I Will Be Invincible, Lily started out trying to Set Right What Once Went Wrong. Then she succeeded, realized she liked things better the other way, and became a supervillain in the past to try to mess things up again. At least, that's what she tells people.
- Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World. The arch villain "He" tries to change the past to eliminate the Special Corps, the only organization capable of thwarting him.
- One of the changes he seemingly makes is to give Napoleon's army advanced artillery. Since Napoleon was already an artillery genius, this allows him to easily beat all the nations allied against him. Then it turns out "He" created this pocket universe specifically to lure the protagonist and trap him there as the universe collapses.
- Star Trek;
- In Barbara Hambly's novel Ishmael, the Klingons time-travel back to the 1800s to kill a man who prevented an alien empire from taking over the Earth. Due to the intervention of Spock and the Enterprise crew, all they end up doing is alerting the man that aliens exist and thereby creating the event they were trying to stop.
- The novel Imzadi opens in a future timeline where Admiral William Riker discovers possible evidence that Deanna Troi was killed by a time traveller forty years ago (an autopsy reveals that she was apparently killed with a poison that didn't exist yet, but Commodore Data of the Enterprise-F observes that the poison has been known to occur in nature in rare cases). Travelling to the past through the Guardian of Forever, Admiral Riker confirms that Troi was killed because of the impact she would have had on a vital peace conference; if she had survived, Troi's experience with this species (who are hard to read empathically unless the empath has sufficient prior experience of the race in question) would have revealed their intention to use the conference to buy time for them to rebuild their power base, but with Troi exposing their agenda the conference is abandoned until the race in question are more desperate and will accept more restricted terms.
- In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories, the villains often are after this. Once, the heroes have to do, and Manse realizes that they are not protecting the "real" history but the history that leads to them.
- In Alex Scarrow's TimeRiders series, the line between this and Set Right What Once Went Wrong is very blurry regarding the villains.
- Kramer did the classic plan of going back to deal with Hitler but instead convincing him not to invade Russia, hopefully steering the 20th Century in a completely different direction to avoid the extinction of humanity in 2070.
- Howard Goodall attempted to assassinate Edward Chan, thus preventing the one-of-a-kind prodigy from creating the theory that would enable time travel.
- Project Exodus planned on hijacking the Roman Empire to redirect 2000 years' worth of history. It ends catastrophically, to say the least.
- A lot of this is 'justified' by being For the Greater Good.
- As one might expect, many of the antagonists in Simon Hawke's Time Wars series have this motivation.
- Most of the books in the Warlock of Gramarye series are a fight between two time-traveling political factions, the ones who want to foster democracy all over the galaxy and the ones who oppose it. Sometimes, as in the case of Rod's oldest son, the bad guys win.
