Time travel is a plot device almost as old as science fiction itself. It seems that as soon as we are allowed to create whatever technology we want, we use it to explore and change the past and future. From Star Trek's "City on the Edge of Forever" to Terminator 2: Judgment Day to Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban, the idea of ​​time travel has captivated the human imagination. Octavia Butler's novel Kindred adds to the robust canon of time travel in science fiction, but at the same time it puts a unique spin on the centuries-old 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 should not be banned"? Get an original essay There are two main "types" of time travel: time travel with the intention of changing the past or the future and time travel with the intention of keeping the past or future intact, and it is surprising how rare the first type is. Time travel in an attempt to change the past or future is usually a staple of stories that rely more on fantasy science than scientific reality. Doctor Who and Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban are two examples. The second type of time travel, time travel for the purpose of preserving the past or future, is also the type most familiar to most people, with famous examples in the Star Trek episode " The City on the Edge of Eternity” and in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The main difference between these two types of time travel has to do primarily with their relationship to the nature of time. Traveling through time to preserve the past or future views time as fragile, with any change inherently negative due to the change in the future we return to. In contrast, time travel to change the past or future views time as less fragile – and less linear – than the other type. When the work depicts this type of time travel, the timeline is not destroyed when tampered with, but rather the tampering is the accomplishment of something that has already happened. Kindred borrows elements from both types of time travel, with Dana struggling to change her family's history as little as possible while constantly being forced to save Rufus from his own misfortune. At the same time, Kindred remains intentionally vague about whether Dana's actions actually affected the past. When Dana and Kevin return and research Dana's family history at the end of the novel, what they find matches the events they witnessed. At the same time, because they hadn't thought to do the same research beforehand, we as an audience, as well as Dana and Kevin themselves, don't know exactly how much of what happened was due to their interference and to what extent this was already set in stone generations before. .What makes Kindred different from these other time travel stories? On the one hand, the common idea of ​​a timeline that cannot be altered is nonexistent. Butler's view of time travel is more like Doctor Who's "big ball of wonky temporal things" than "a strict 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 is not made better by her actions, no matter how hard she tries to save him from the effects that the period has..