Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Sep 2019
352 pages
Genre: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Publication Information
From Annalee Newitz, founding editor of io9, comes a story of time travel, murder, and the lengths we'll go to protect the ones we love.
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
"Breathtakingly brilliant."—The New York Times
"Annalee Newitz combines time travel, multi-alternative realities and feminist politics in the fast-paced, complex and mind-blowing The Future of Another Timeline ... a compulsively readable novel of controlled anger that, despite the horror, offers hope."—The Guardian
"Where the book really shines is in its page-turning plot and thoughtfully drawn characters... the story charges along until Newitz suddenly ties it all together with breathtaking finesse. An ambitious adventure that keeps the surprises coming."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[Newitz] highlights the truths of our past and possibilities of our future. The fantastical elements do not hide the all-too-real horrors women could face, but intelligence and hope are woven into every level."—Library Journal (starred review)
"Newitz's carefully built narrative of time travel and conflict is rooted in the drive and joys of intersectional feminism, sex positivity, and acceptance...This riot of a book will have readers delighting both in the thrilling battle over timelines in an intricate, alternative world and in the joys of inclusive feminist solidarity."—Booklist (starred review)
"[A] multilayered tale of "editing" history, human rights, and the ripple effect...Smart and profound on every level, this is a deeply satisfying novel."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Few stories are as smart, as nuanced, as exciting, and as unsettling as this one....engrossing and impactful."—Karen Joy Fowler, bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
"A glorious tale of hope in the face of outrage, an anthem of timeless resistance against the powers that would lead us to our worst futures."—Ken Liu, Author of The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Grace of Kings
"The Future of Another Timeline does brilliantly what SF does best: makes metaphor concrete to illuminate the human condition. In this case, the idea that women are consistently written out of history by men is turned into a visceral reality, and secret history becomes a thrilling secret war."—Nicola Griffith, author of Hild
"The Future of Another Timeline is the mind-blowing punk feminist sci-fi time traveling thriller you've been waiting for, and which our culture desperately needs. Packed with action, sass, righteousness, technology and danger, it just might be a perfect book."—Michelle Tea
"A revolution is happening in speculative fiction, and Annalee Newitz is leading the vanguard."—Wil Wheaton, actor Star Trek and Big Bang Theory
"Newitz always sees to the heart of complex systems and breaks them down with poetic ferocity."—N. K. Jemisin, author of the Broken Earth trilogy and The City We Became
"Few stories are as smart, as nuanced, as exciting, and as unsettling as this one....engrossing and impactful."—Karen Joy Fowler, bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
BookBrowse Review
"In Annalee Newitz's latest novel, The Future of Another Timeline, time travel is a reality and has been for centuries. Authorized "travelers" take advantage of one of five known Machines – ancient, mysterious contraptions that open wormholes into the past. Generally, such adventures are undertaken by academics researching history, but as the book opens it's become apparent that someone is "editing" the timeline to restrict women's rights. A group of women who call themselves the Daughters of Harriet have banded together to determine who's responsible and to correct history. One of their number, Tess, volunteers to undertake the mission, but has a secondary motive: she also intends to correct her own history in the process, editing out an unfortunate event that occurred in 1992, during her youth.
The book is timely; for the first time in nearly 50 years abortions may once again become illegal in the United States, and the ability to obtain a legal abortion is one of the rights the Daughters of Harriet seek to restore. The story is really a fable, imaging a future where women's roles are largely restricted, and pointing to the need to work collectively to ensure such a future never occurs.
There is much to like about the novel. Plots centering around time travel can be confusing, and Newitz clearly explains what's happening when. She strikes an excellent balance between having the Machines be completely black-boxy (i.e., no information about them at all) and being overly technical. Much of the action takes place in 1893 during the Chicago World's Fair, and the author really brings this time period to life as well. And finally, her character development is exceptional, and from that standpoint alone the novel is worth taking a look at.
In spite of all that the novel has going for it, though, it just didn't work for me – and I realize I may be in the minority here. Although the main characters are well-developed, those in the 1893 timeline are too modern; their speech, actions and attitudes don't fit with the time period. (There's an especially New Age-y scene where the women call upon the pre-Islamic goddess al-Lat and the leader teachers her followers how to masturbate that seems particularly out of place.) And the villains are, in my opinion, pretty dreadful – caricatures straight out of the cartoons. I was also bothered by the fact that everything seems way too easy for the heroines; the right people always coincidentally appear, the right opportunity presents itself at the right time, etc. One of the characters has an illegal abortion, and I felt that if the author was trying to make a point about how awful and risky illegal abortions are she could have made the process much more fraught; as portrayed, it isn't ideal, but it doesn't seem hard to obtain or particularly dangerous in any regard. The teenagers in the 1992 timeline commit some pretty horrific crimes, too; late in the book the rationale for them is revealed, but there aren't any repercussions, which makes it seem like the author condones violence. Finally, some of my objections to the book may simply be that I'm not its intended audience; it seems geared toward younger women who are actively involved in feminist causes, and it just didn't resonate with me as an older reader.
The Future of Another Timeline has garnered several award nominations and a wide audience, but I can't say I enjoyed it; for me it's a solid three-star novel."
—Kim Kovacs
This information about The Future of Another Timeline was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
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Photo: Sarah Deragon
Annalee Newitz is an American journalist, editor, and author of fiction and nonfiction. They are the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship from MIT, and have written for Popular Science, The New Yorker, and the Washington Post. They founded the science fiction website io9 and served as Editor-in-Chief from 2008–2015, and then became Editor-in-Chief at Gizmodo and Tech Culture Editor at Ars Technica. Their book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction was nominated for the LA Times Book Prize in science. Their first novel, Autonomous, won a Lambda award.
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