The Great Do-Over

Abstract The coda focuses on the idea, prevalent in contemporary fiction, that to change the future one must fix what has gone wrong in the past. Time-travel fictions like Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline envision activists who can “edit” history in order to correct for evils like slavery and racism. A counterexample is Octavia Butler’s Kindred, in which the time-traveling heroine must preserve the historical timeline in spite of its corruption. In the time-loop story, such as Groundhog Day, by contrast, the individual relives a period of time over and over until a better self emerges. Against their ostensible objectives, both versions of this fantasy underscore the extent to which meaning itself depends on linear time.