Timequake

Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut is a science fiction. Somehow the universe went into a contraction and went back ten years. Then for ten years, people were forced to act on auto-pilot. Every act was repeated again just as it did the first time around. Everyone knew what was going to happen, but nobody could change anything about it. They just had to act everything out exactly the same all over again. At the end of the tenth year, free will finally kicked in and then people could start acting freely if they still remembered how.

This seems like an interesting concept, however immensely horrifying. Imagine the Jews who survived the Nazi's. Now they knew what would happen to them. Given a chance, they would have certainly fled the country before it all started, and saved their families that they were unable to save the first time along with them. But since they would be on auto-pilot and could not act on free will, they could not change a thing, with the knowledge of what's gonna happen to them the whole time.

That is just beyond cruel.