Post-Modern Blog Name

John Wilkes Booth is often regarded as a villain by many today. His assassination of Abraham Lincoln is commonly regarded as an act of pure evil and a great tragedy in the mythology of America. In fact, the narrative of Abraham Lincoln’s life, death, and presidency has been canonized and idealized in the public consciousness equally, if not more, than the founding of our country.  Conversly, Kennedy’s assassin and assassination—perhaps the penultimate examples of both in our nation’s history in terms of impact, remain enigmatic, and just outside of relevancy. We know that Booth was motivated by his love for the Confederacy, Oswald’s motivations remain a mystery. Was it politically motivated? Did he work on his own? Was he even the actual killer? Despite the century time difference between these two presidential assassinations to develop new crime solving technology and techniques, the Lincoln assassination remains far more cut and dry. Despite Kennedy’s role in America’s dom...

The first things I thought of when it became apparent that Kindred uses  time travel as a major plot device were  a) Was Dana going to be able to change the future? And b) How is the time travel working? I’m going to take a stab at answering both of these questions. On the surface, the answer to question A should be fairly simple— Dana is only pulled back in time when Rufus’s life is in danger—therefore by saving his life, she must be changing the future, right?  However, the only reason that we assume that the time travel is triggered by this mechanism is because Dana says so. Let’s consider a few things though: 1) in all of the situations that Dana has been pulled into, there has always been either not immediate danger to Rufus’s life, such as with the burning drapes; or another person present, such as Nigel, who could have helped Rufus in an alternate timeline. Additionally, we see towards the end of the book that Dana can be “summoned” by Rufus’s emotional distres...