I love time travel in fiction. It’s such a fascinating plot mechanic, especially when we consider people’s fear of the unknown future. However, sometimes the way it works and its paradoxes can get pretty confusing. In Kindred, Dana can’t be sure if her presence in history changed the way her ancestors and she eventually got born, or if her own displacement was what led to her present as it is in the first place. This example of time travel is paradoxical: how could she have been born if she never existed to time travel and ensure it?

It’s hard to separate time travel and alternate universes, which makes everything even more confusing. After someone time travels and creates a future different from their previous present, what happens to the first timeline? Did it continue on without the time traveler, or is there another version of them that came back without having made any changes? So many different books, movies, and shows take advantage of the unknown nature of time travel to create their own rules, which is why it is so entertaining as a plot device. However, there’s so much that could go wrong with it that I’m somewhat glad time travel on this scale doesn’t exist in real life.