There are few things that fascinate people more than time travel.

From H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" to Robert Grimwood's "Replay" to Jack Finney's "Time and Again" to Richard Matheson's lovely "Bid Time Return," traveling into the future (Wells) or the past (the other three) has been fodder for some wonderful stories.

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This week, with the release of "11/22/63," the master of modern storytelling has taken his own shot at time travel. Stephen King said he first had the idea for this novel in 1972, when he was still an unpublished novelist. He didn't feel qualified to write it then, so he went on to become one of  the best-selling novelists of his generation, with more than 300 million copies in print.

King wisely doesn't try to explain how his character is able to travel into the past. There's just a gate that someone discovered that always takes the person walking through it to the same day and time in September 1958.

The character's goal is to stay in the past until Nov. 22, 1963, what he calls one of those watershed moments in history, and prevent Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating President Kennedy.

Can it be done?

And if so, what would the consequences be?

Could we assume that a continuing Kennedy administration would have meant a lesser role in Vietnam, fewer urban riots and no Nixon administration? Or would things change in far more basic, cataclysmic ways?

One of the continuing themes in the book is that the past resists being changed, and the more important the change is, the more it resists. Trying to prevent a young girl from being paralyzed in a hunting accident might draw only a little resistance, while saving Kennedy from being killed might mean that the hero of the tale has to figuratively walk through hell to do it.

In fact, the very idea of time travel is highly problematic. If we accept time as we know it, the past no longer exists to be visited and the future hasn't happened yet. To accept time travel, we almost have to believe that each instant in time creates some sort of parallel universe. For "11/22/63" and its premise