Time travel is a plot device almost as old as science fiction itself. It seems that as soon as we have permission to create whatever technology we want, we use it to explore and change the past and the future. From Star Trek's “The City on the Edge of Forever” to Terminator 2: Judgment Day to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the idea of ​​time travel has captured the human imagination. Octavia Butler's novel Kindred adds to the robust canon of time travel in science fiction, but at the same time puts a unique twist on the time-worn tradition by completely ignoring many of the typical sources of tension in these stories. plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay There are two main "types" of time travel: time travel with the intent to change the past or future, and time travel with the intent to keep the past or future intact, and it's amazing how the first type is rare. Time travel with the intent of changing the past or future is generally a staple of stories that lean more toward scientific fantasy than scientific fact. Doctor Who and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban are two examples. The second type of time travel, time travel with the intent of preserving the past or future, is also the type most familiar to most people, with famous examples both in the Star Trek episode "The City on 'edge of eternity" that in Terminator 2.: Judgment Day. The main difference that separates these two types of time travel is mainly related to how they relate to the nature of time. Time travel to preserve the past or future considers time fragile, as any change is inherently bad due to the change in the future it will be returned to. Time travel to change the past or future, on the other hand, treats time as less fragile – and less linear – than the other kind. When the work portrays this type of time travel, the timeline is not destroyed when it is tampered with, but rather the tampering is the fulfillment of something that has already happened. Kindred borrows elements from both of these types of time travel, with Dana struggling to change her family's history as little as possible while at the same time constantly forced to save Rufus from his own misfortune. At the same time, Kindred is purposely vague about whether or not Dana's actions truly affected the past. When Dana and Kevin return and do their research into Dana's family history at the end of the novel, what they find matches the events they witnessed. At the same time, since they didn't think to do the same research beforehand, both we as the audience and Dana and Kevin themselves are unsure how much of what happened was due to their interference and how much was already set in stone generations ago. Before. .What distinguishes Kindred from these other time travel tales? First, the common idea of ​​a timeline that cannot be tampered with is non-existent. Butler's vision of time travel more closely resembles Doctor Who's "big ball of wobbly, wobbly stuff" than "a rigorous progression of cause and effect" (Moffet s3e10). Dana's actions in the past appear to have little to no effect on the progression of time. Rufus does not become a better person because of his actions, no matter how hard he tries to save him from the effects the time period inevitably has on his personality, nor is his existence affected when he..