Slavery is about trauma. Trauma is about events too emotionally overwhelming to be integrated into one's understanding. These are the kind of events that clinically result in repressed or altered memories. Reality has to surrender so that the personality can survive. And sometimes it still doesn't survive.

In treatment, the patient has to be helped to tolerate what was once intolerable. In part this is done by reframing it--say, by making it into a story. This isn't science, but art. Only powerful art will allow the inexpressible to be expressed, allowing the trauma to heal.

The result is an alteration of time and space. In the novel, this is symbolized by a literal alteration--a superpower that transcends physical boundaries. Like all superpowers, it has limits and comes at great cost to the possessor.

But this isn't a genre novel or a tale of good guys versus badguys. It's about what we can allow ourselves to understand as individuals and as a society. It turns out that those who don't suffer understand the least of all.