Kindred
At the end of Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred , Dana is permanently crippled by a touch from Rufus Wainright. While Rufus has hurt Dana before, his grabbing of her arm at the end of the novel is the first time that Dana comes to severe harm as a result of her time travel. She had been concerned about other potential forms of harm, but always either caused by the need for fear-of-death to remove her from the 1800s, or caused by the dizziness associated with her trips into the past. She did have concerns about the possibility of momentum-transfer from being in a car while going back to the past, but, while similar to what happens to her with Rufus, the effect is not entirely the same. When she returns to 1976, her arm is physically merged into a wall in that time, a wall which obviously did not exist in the 1800s. Unlike the potential for momentum transfer, Dana was not near a wall in a way which could’ve caused the injury. Instead, it is Rufus’ attempt to hold her back, and th...