A university profession uses a unique form of time travel to avenge himself on is academic enemies.
This title story for The Winds of Change and Other Stories is a heavy-handed attack on the Moral Majority. Asimov was very proud of it, because he detested the Moral Majority and was glad to be so open in attacking them so viciously. Although I tend to agree with Asimov’s assessment of the Moral Majority, as a reader of fiction I find his cautionary or overtly political stories too unsubtle to be interesting. This one is particularly weak because it is basically a monologue outlining the protagonist’s bizarre form of time travel as he makes is victims squirm before he does them in, and as such there’s only one real character and he’s too nasty to be attractive.
Asimov would have been better off, methinks, to write a subtle attack on the Moral Majority as he had with McCarthyism. The result there was “The Martian Way,” which makes its point and is a good story to read as well.
The story does have a certain relevance, however, after the rise of the Tea Party movement in the aftermath of the 2008 Presidential election. To those who diagree with them, Tea Partiers can seem positively paranoid about the horrors they feel the Obama administration is trying to bring about. “The Winds of Change” is a good illulstration of the same sort of paranoia on the left, and it does represent a certain strand of feeling which was genuinely present during the Reagan years.
