Time Travel Exercise

A lot of time travel narratives deal with what is called "The Grandfather Paradox."

From Wikipedia: "The grandfather paradox is a paradox of time travel in which inconsistencies emerge through changing the past. The name comes from the paradox's common description as a person who travels to the past and kills their own grandfather, preventing the existence of their father or mother and therefore their own existence. Any inconsistency in past events may be regarded as a grandfather paradox."

One of the things I asked you to think about with Kindred is how the past is already always alive in the present. One reason I asked you to think about this is because it necessarily points to how this novel is about a truth about past and present that goes deeper than The Grandfather Paradox, as the paradox is about linear time.

In order to start understanding these distinctions, I'd like you, along with the person I paired you with, to create the basic plot summary for a time travel narrative in which someone changes something in the past (whether small or large), and for you to articulate how that practically affects the present.

Your write up should be well thought through--give this a good page.

Discuss together all the various ways in which this situation could go wrong, all the variables that might be unknown.

Your character should start off from TODAY and go backward to some time of your choosing in human history. The significance of the time period matters, too. Why did you choose it?