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"E for Effort" is a 15,000-word story by T.L. Sherred about men who invent and then exploit a machine which is capable of filming the past. The story first appeared in the May, 1947 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.

Plot

Ed wanders into a Mexican movie theatre, where he watches a 10 minute movie depicting a very realistic battle. He talks to the theatre owner about the film, a man named Miguel, who shows him his invention—a machine that presents a three dimensional depiction of any time or place in history. Miguel had simply picked out a historical battle and filmed it. Miguel explains that he can think of no way to make more money off of his invention (like investigating companies to decide which stock to buy), since he has no capital. Ed becomes his partner, and together they raise some initial funds by blackmailing some important people. They use the proceeds from that to buy some good photographic equipment, and use their invention to film the life of Alexander the Great. They show the rough cut to some Hollywood executives, who agree to become partners; the Hollywood people provide actors to fill in some missing scenes, as well as voice over dialogue. When released, the movie is a smash hit, since it is so much more authentic than anything else Hollywood is making. They make several other movies, including one about the fall of the Roman empire, and all are successful.

Eventually they become rich enough to develop a social conscience. They hire some multilingual lip-readers, and use those lip-reading skills and their past-filming machine to make a documentary showing closed-door deliberations by world leaders from recent history. Their movie shows that all the world’s leaders from every country conspired, for their own personal reasons, to plunge the world into the two world wars, not caring about the death and suffering that would result. The Powers-That-Be then ban the movie, and have Ed, Miguel, and their Hollywood allies arrested and put on trial. Ed tells everyone how the movie, and all his other movies, were really made, placing his hopes on the anger of the population to save him. However, the army kills them all, and invades their headquarters to confiscate the machine and any copies they may have made of the blueprints.

Additional Notes

This was the author's first published science fiction story. "E for Effort" has been reprinted in, among other places, Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 9 (1947), and in the author's own collection, First Person Peculiar (1972).

The concept of a machine which can view or record the past has been also been used in the 1949 short story "Private Eye" by Lewis Padgett, in the 1995 novel Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card, and in the 2006 movie Deja Vu.