The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz is a time-travelling science fiction novel. I picked it up based on the promise that there would be both time travel and lesbians, though it turned out to be more diverse than just that description implies.

1992: After a confrontation at a riot grrl concert, seventeen-year-old Beth finds herself in a car with her friend's abusive boyfriend dead in the backseat, agreeing to help her friends hide the body. This murder sets Beth and her friends on a path of escalating violence and vengeance as they realize many other young women in the world need protecting too.

2022: Determined to use time travel to create a safer future, Tess has dedicated her life to visiting key moments in history and fighting for change. But rewriting the timeline isn’t as simple as editing one person or event. And just when Tess believes she's found a way to make an edit that actually sticks, she encounters a group of dangerous travelers bent on stopping her at any cost.

Tess and Beth’s lives intertwine as war breaks out across the timeline--a war that threatens to destroy time travel and leave only a small group of elites with the power to shape the past, present, and future. Against the vast and intricate forces of history and humanity, is it possible for a single person’s actions to echo throughout the timeline?

I am still internally screaming about something in this book I can't even talk about here because it is a massive spoiler.
😱 😱 😱
OK, I found some people to talk it over with, so that's out of my system now. Moving on to the actual review.

As you might expect from a book about time travel, there are a couple of story threads in this book, though they get a little more tangled up than non-time travelling flashback sequences tend to. We have Tess, who is from the near future and working with a secret feminist cabal to stop misogynists from editing women's rights out of the timeline (loosely speaking). She travels to various times, with a particular focus on 1892-3 with regards to her research and secret mission. And then in the 1990s we have some punk rock teenage girls living their slightly crappy lives and going to gigs, as seen through the eyes of Beth, one of the teens.

The 1990s storyline serves to highlight the differences between the starting timeline and the parallel world that we, the readers, live in. It also sets up a background for Tess and people like her, especially when Tess starts trying to change her past by illegally travelling to the 1990s. This is tangentially related to my internal screaming above.

But the overarching story is about fighting for rights and the methods by which history is made/changed. An ongoing debate in the book concerns the efficacy of collective action vs the Great Man theory; whether history can be changed incrementally and/or whether killing Hitler actually does anyone any good. But this is more a book about the characters, mostly women, looking out for each other, no matter the time period. If that's your jam, then this may well be the book for you.

Overall I really enjoyed this book. Some parts of it took my by surprise and there was more violence than I expecting going in, but it was violence born out of the anger of the oppressed as much as anything else, and the book was very much in conversation with the justification, or not, of some forms of violence. While there might be a bit of a squick factor associated with some of the violence, I thought it was explored thoughtfully in the book as a whole.

I highly recommend The Future of Another Timeline to fans of time travel and/or feminism. This is the first thing I've read by Annalee Newitz and I am interested in picking up more of their work in the future.

4.5 / 5 stars

First published: 2019, Tor Books
Series: No
Format read: ePub
Source: Purchased from Kobo

Short stories (1–5), a seemingly slow start, amidst much hidden reading

So this is my first #ReadShortStories post of 2020. April might seem a bit late, but in defence of my short story reading consistency, I would like to point out that until the end of March I was reading a large number of stories that were submitted to Rebuilding Tomorrow. So any time I thought about reading a short story that wasn't a submission, I felt guilty. But that's over now. The submissions have all been read and responded to (either with a rejection or a hold request, bending a higher level of global stability — if you submitted something but didn't hear back, feel free to query).

Which brings me to this first batch of stories. Without further ado:

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Did We Break the End of the World? by Tansy Rayner Roberts — Reread in aid of editing a sequel story that will be appearing in Rebuilding Tomorrow. Source: Defying Doomsday edited by Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench

The Frost on Jade Buds by Aliette de Bodard — A story of mindships, the threat of war and galactic foreigners. I didn’t get into this story as easily as I have some of the other Xuya stories. Source: The Dragon that Flew Out of the Sun by Aliette de Bodard

Meat Cute by Gail Carriger — A novelette prequel to the novel Soulless. You don’t have to have read Soulless or the Finishing School books to appreciate this story… but I do think it would help a lot. It’s cute and funny, as one expects from Carriger, and follows Alexia on the night of her very first meeting with Connal. Source: Stand-alone purchase

Inheritance by Emma Newman — An emotional slice of a character’s life, set before the events in Planetfall. A good read, but probably not as impactful if you haven’t read Planetfall. Source: Emma Newman’s newsletter

The Generation Gap by Emma Newman — A significant story (not a vignette) about a father who is worried that there’s something wrong with his kid. I loved the reversal and the plausibility of the resolution. I think it’s my favourite story of this series. Source: Emma Newman’s newsletter