The Many Forms of Time Travel

Too many sources to count deal with the abstract idea of time-travel, that, without human knowledge of exactly how this is possible, we can envision jumping to periods of time outside of our own. But they all have different ways of going about it, and different implications for the future. To begin with, movies, such as Back to the Future, often have time travel existing with a caution: any actions done in the past directly influence the future. Kindred seems to follow this model pretty closely, and we get the sense from both of these examples that Marty McFly and Dana will both cease to exist in the future if they don't perform their necessary tasks. This is one way to go about explaining time-travel.

Kurt Vonnegut has a different way of writing about this concept. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim does not merely see his past/future self, instead he is his past/future self. He can't change his actions or his past/future; however, Billy is able to adopt a bored attitude that definitely influences what his compatriots in the train car say to him. So Billy has some fluctuation between observer and participant in his time-travel experience. But the important (relevant) idea is he is his past self, not merely watching.

Every book about time-travel seems to have a different interpretation and way of describing this phenomenon. My personal favorite is Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (the one book in the series with no Voldemort involvements!). In the third installment of the Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling uses magic to justify having time-travel in her book. The element I like most about the nature of her time travel is that Harry does see himself hours earlier but everything he does completes his memory of what had happened before and answers his previous questions (read chapters 16-21 if you're interested, particularly 21). Basically, there is no way Harry can destroy a space-time continuum if every action of his simply plays into the past he remembers. In addition, Harry and Hermione go back three hours in time but the gist of it is, they're not always three hours ahead of their past selves, rather, they have three hours before their past selves will be going back in time. Thus, Harry and Hermione must get back to where they were location-wise when they traveled in time to ensure that their story goes on cleanly from other witnesses' perspectives.

Kindred, though, has an interesting storyline in that Dana went back in time not on her own will, but rather as a summoning by a character of that time. Dana does not travel back accidentally like Marty McFly or on purpose like Harry Potter but rather by a force outside of her world in 1976. The plot of Kindred sort of follows along with the standard Back to the Future sets (I actually don't know which was made first, the movie or the book, so I'll just base it on a Back to the Future standard) where Dana has to do these tasks or she will not exist one hundred and fifty years later. Marty McFly, of course, has to keep his real location in time secret, but Dana uses her present and the progress the nation had made from 1819 or so to 1976 for useful means. One, it immensely helps her to at least try and mold Rufus into a respectable, tolerant adult (which still isn't really enough) by coaxing him to adopt some of the polite measures of her time (as seen in "The Fire"). Secondly, being open about her advanced position and ability to save Rufus from his various situations helps Dana get some recognition and, dare I say it, respect from him which she needs in order to save her lineage and free her life from constant callbacks to the nineteenth century.