I think this book started out strong with a great premise and high stakes. I was invested in the characters and their mission. I feel, however, that the ending and wrap up was too tidy and didn't really feel satisfying or earned.

The Future of Another Timeline tells the story of two women from different timelines as they converge across different realities. But the book’s pacing felt off. The main character felt like she lacked a concrete goal, so she often would travel to different locations seemingly at random. I really wanted to like this book, especially because the world building was so interesting, but it didn’t work for me.

3.5

Our pasts, presents and futures are connected.

In a world where time-traveling Machines have always existed, two timelines are competing for dominance. In 2022, Tess and the Daughters of Harriet have been trying to correct the timeline against a secret society of misogynistic assholes determined to erode women and trans rights. In 1992, Beth and her friends are pulled into the world of riot grrls and murder in an ever escalating path. Slowly the two times begin to intersect and flow.

This was a fascinating feminist time travel story, with a host of queer characters stacked against a powerfully misogynistic minority determined to use their pull and sway to remove women's rights. The incel culture plays a huge role in naming women and determining their place (or utter lack thereof) in the society of the future and the past.

I enjoyed a lot of the differences in history, with Senator Harriet Tubman and many other things, and the various ways the Daughters of Harriet remember the changing timelines and corrections by remembering things that had been.

I remember a time when abortion was legal.

Again, a fascinating look at women's rights—and women's roles in society throughout the centuries.

While I was less than entranced with Beth's story—because honestly I just didn't care for most of her story, although at times I wanted more and other times I wanted less—I was all in for Tess's story.

I loved the idea of a non-violent way of change, of using communal action to pursue change instead of power and force and threats. Of the concept of sacrifice, of changing yourself and the world, one step at a time. At the big picture and the very real people who are affected by decisions made up high for the better good.

If I enjoyed it so much, then why the 3.5 stars?

Because I felt like it could have been developed just a little bit better. The villain wasn't as fleshed out as they could have been—until the end they were a boogeyman. While their actions were horrific and the future they had created was dismal and brutal, I wished that more of Elliott had been developed just so that I could hate him that much more (and I already hated him quite a bit). Also, I wanted more of Aseel and more of the ladies of 1893 and more of the Daughters of Harriet and...decidedly less of Beth.

Yes, her life was horrible but I honestly didn't care for much of her timeline until she finally left for college and began to face what was happening. I just...I dunno. Much of her timeline was frustrating, mainly because she faced very few consequences for her actions, and her intersections with Tess were frustrating and felt forced into the main storyline.

Anywho, this is a different story and definitely one to explore if you want to read a queer feminist time-traveling rallying cry against the dangers of allowing the incels and douche-canoes to have a voice and a platform. And the dangers of white feminism—which was handedly explored and given a proper thumping.

I received this ARC from NetGalley for an honest review

This is a lucky edit.

I entered the world of THE FUTURE OF ANOTHER TIMELINE feeling like I could have been confused or alienated from a teenagerhood so different from mine, but I wasn't. I entered that world, and I feel now like I'll never leave it. It will stick with me, the way that friends stick with each other through their own worst days, for better or worse, for middle class or poorer, for murder or time-travel. Although, sidebar: I really appreciated that nobody follows anybody blindly into anything, and agency over one's own life is in fact the through-line of this book. Losing it, regaining it, fighting tooth-and-nail for it.

There's so much to love about this book. There are impeccably researched vistas taking in the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. There are repeated unironic uses of the word "Saskatchewan." There are time-traveling Spiritualist feminists battling time-traveling misogynist jerks. Trans people exist and––well, no spoilers, but it's a good one. Nonbinary people exist and are freakin' badass. Teenage serial killers exist and are both better and worse than that sounds. Soft pointers for anyone looking to enact a bit of control over their reproductive rights and seek independence from toxic family relationships are woven in throughout. Swears are sworn. White supremacists with bad-guy mustaches are repeatedly pulped. Orgasms are achieved. While time-traveling. And I'm pretty sure one of the characters is secretly Doctor Who, although I'm leaning more towards a genderbent Eccleston than a Tennant. Fake bands become real bands, sort of, since Newitz went out and pretty much made it happen in real life. (Google: "What I Like to See" by Grape Ape, which features ... a bunch of dope-ass modern riot grrrls and folk.)

This book breaks everything. In such a gorgeous, delightful, lovable way.

I liked this a lot. It was interesting political sci-fi. That's hard to pull off without being preachy or boring!

It's also a very good argument for libraries/ARCs. I would never have bought this in a million years because I thought Autonomous had some good ideas but lacked character and coherence, but thought this was much better. I am a huge sucker for multiverse/timeline stuff though! And the character development was much more interesting and nuanced than I was expecting.

This isn't a book for those who love subtlety and delicate allusion. It's brash and lurid, but hey these are brash and lurid times, and it is a loud and necessary voice in today's climate. It's a passionate and angry novel, and if I'd read it when I was fifteen it would probably have changed my life.

There's an interesting and original set up for time travel, but I felt that some of the stuff about repercussions of changing history got a bit handwavey and had the sense the author was hurrying us past some of it in case we looked a bit too closely. The main thrust of the book isn't the science though, it's all about societal change and how that happens / can be made to happen. The punk rock revolution of riot grrrl rhymes nicely with the story of nineteenth century music hall upsetting social mores, and demonstrates how resistance is necessary through the ages.

Tess is a time traveling member of the Daughters of Harriet, a group that does it's best to make their present time, 2022, a safe place for women, whether cis or trans. There's a men's right's activist group from further in the future trying to undermine their efforts by erasing the Daughters of Harriet and women's rights folks from the timeline. Meanwhile, in 1992, teenager Beth, a friend from Tess' past, finds herself in a bit of a pickle. She and her friends kill a boy who was in the process of sexually assaulting their friend. This starts the girls down a murderous path that Tess will do her best to stop.

For the most part, I enjoyed this book. I usually enjoy time travel, unless its being used as a cheap plot device which was definitely not the case here. Newitz did a lot of homework for this one - the historical notes at the end were really interesting and trips to the past often include historical figures. The story alternates between Tess and Beth with a few other perspectives thrown in on occasion. Tess mainly splits her time between the late 1800s (easily my favorite parts), the early 1990s and her present in 2022, while Beth's story is firmly situated in 1992. While I enjoyed both stories, I never really felt compelled to read the book. Both perspectives were interesting, but not captivating or thought-provoking (though I suspect the book will provide plenty of thinking material for some readers). As a result, certain plot points felt unnecessary and the book felt overlong. I really hated the way Tess' story ended. Nonetheless, its an enjoyable read that makes a great point (women are people too, who knew?) that I would recommend to science fiction readers that are interested in women, women's and LGBT rights. There's also quite a bit of 90's punk rock that readers of a certain age will love. The ending is also quite optimistic, which I wasn't expecting, but did welcome.

TLDR: The Future of Another Timeline is interesting book full of time travel shenanigans that is plagued by the same issues that all time travel book face. Ultimately, while the book was fun, feminist and full of salient social commentary, it wasn't compelling.

3 stars - I liked it.

Thanks to Netgalley and Tor for the advance copy which I received in exchange for an unbiased review. The Future of Another Timeline will be available for purchase on 24 September, but you can put your copy on hold today!

The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz
9/24/19 (Tor Books)
Annalee Newitz’s first novel, Autonomous, established her as a rule-breaking author to keep an eye on. The Future of Another Timeline marks her as one of the most important new voices in science fiction. It’s one of the best feminist-time-travel-alt-history(ies) novel to come along in this timeline, either in each category or all at once. The story revolves around two main characters, Beth, a punk rocker about to embark on college when her best friend turns into a vigilante killing male abusers, and Tess, a traveler from the future who’s part of The Daughters of Harriet, a small group trying to stop a group of men trying to destroy end time-traveling and strip women of their rights, creating a static timeline. Beth and Tess are bound together across time and Tess is torn between her mission to stop the saboteurs and to prevent the future Beth is heading for, a future she’s already lived through. Meddling in your own past has terrible consequences, but Tess’ knowledge of what’s to come drives her to action no matter the cost. This is possibly the best time travel novel since Connie Willis’s books, and it’s full of fresh ideas, including a world aware that time-travel exists, and in fact pre-dates mankind, and that the past, present, and future may be set in stone, but stones can shift. There’s a lively discussion of the “Great Man” versus “Collective” theories of social change that Asimov would have loved, and if I had a time machine I’d send this back in time 50 years or so to watch science fiction readers and the emergent wave of feminists try to wrap their heads around it.

This book has a message and it's not subtle about it. The time travel technique is interesting. There are rocks across the world that you can use to time travel and mankind has always known. However, this isn't explored as much because the author has a message about men vs women. Characterization feels like there is a woke bingo that is being used instead of creating a fully realized character. The main character, Tess, any understanding I had of her was gone once a twist was revealed. This twist left me feeling disgusted with Tess and not sure if I was supposed to.
And I don't believe Harriet Tubman would have ever been elected to the Senate. There was too much racism and fear of African Americans after the civil war to happen. Even if, for some reason that I couldn't understand, women were give the right to vote long before they really did.
This was wish fulfillment.

Stay with me for a moment. I will get to Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline; I promise. It wasn’t long before Wikipedia launched that it became ubiquitous. In spite of the best efforts of many educators, Wikipedia has built a reputation for being (more or less) reliable. And yet, I regularly blow students’ minds by telling them about Wikipedia shenanigans, like edit wars. An edit war can break out for a lot of reasons, but the end result is the same: a page with content that is constantly shifting until an outside force locks it down. I bring up edit wars because they are at the heart of The Future of Another Timeline…but with time travel.

Tess and her colleagues, the self-named Daughters of Harriet, have been waging an increasingly heated conflict with men’s rights activists over a host of issues that basically boil down to whether or not women will have control of their bodies and reproduction. The MRAs, rallying around the actual crusades of Anthony Comstock, have been sneaking back in time to do nefarious things. Tess et al. are also running around the time stream to undo things or promote greater equality. Meanwhile, Tess has another mission: to stop something terrible from happening when she was a teenager. There are a lot of moving pieces in this book.

As the novel bounces through space-time and from narrator to narrator, we see teams forming, reversals, emotional highs, a dash of serial murder, victories, and a spectacular Spartacus reference. This book clearly has an agenda but, since it’s an agenda I agree with, I didn’t mind much when things suddenly fell into place for Tess and her friends. (Well, not too much, anyway.) Any time my right eyebrow started to lift in skepticism, something fun or interesting or profound would happen and my eyebrow would sink back into place.

I had a great time reading The Future of Another Timeline. Reading it felt like a shot of hope in the arm, considering the news in the United States and the United Kingdom lately. I would definitely recommend this book to people looking for a bookish pick-me-up.

Time travel has always been part of human existence, with a few portals throughout the globe, operated by geologists pounding rocks in a particular pattern. The Daughters of Harriet (devotes of Senator Harriet Tubman) fight for women's rights by editing the timeline in response to Comstockers, incels and men's right's activists working to turn women into mindless (and possibly headless) baby-making machines.

We follow Beth, Lizzie, and Tess through various edits and times and personas. They start off as teenage riotgrrls, pulled into a series of violent murders of violent men, through to editing the timeline with all the repercussions that follow.

Visceral, terrifying, and weirdly, kind of fun, this is a highly original time travel/dystopia/feminist/alternate history that is a must-read for science fiction fans.

I had to DNF. Even though I'm totally down for the political and ideological underpinnings, I found that it lacked a lot of subtlety.

Brutal, angry, cathartic and entertaining, this book made me want to scream with equal parts celebration and rage! The Future of another Timeline uses time travel as a device to explore issues surrounding women’s rights, race, gender, LGBTQA+ rights, and then some. It follows some of these themes more directly than others but also poses more open-ended questions which encourage the reader to think broadly. While this book contemplates extremely serious and depressingly relevant issues, the engaging and accessible writing style definitely helps to balance the serious and often grim tone. It features a cast of interesting and diverse characters, several engaging, if a bit simple, plot lines and a delightfully original means of time travel. I will definitely be putting The Future of Another Timeline out on my library’s Staff Recommends table!

Unfortunately I did not get on with this book and therefore did not finish it.
I struggled to connect with the story and any of the characters.
I found it to be a little all over the place and in some places did not make sense to me.

Here i s my review. As requested, I will not post this online until just before the book's publication date. When that date arrives, I will post this review on my blog The Pinocchio Theory <http://www.shaviro.com/Blog>.

Annalee Newitz's new science fiction novel, THE FUTURE OF ANOTHER TIMELINE, is set in a United States, and a world, that is similar but not identical to our own. I got to read an advance copy of the novel thanks to Netgalley, which asks me in return to write a review. I loved the novel, but in order to explain it I will need to be a bit nerdy. I will try to avoid too many spoilers, but give a warning when one I cannot omit discussing is about to come up.
In the world of the novel, time travel is a reality; there are five portals, in Canada, Jordan, Mali, India, and Australia, which allow people to travel into the past (but not into the future). Nobody knows who or what forces created the portals; they have existed for hundreds of millions of years, at least since the Cambrian and Ordovician periods. Time travel is an object of academic study, in the field of geochronology, which seems to combine geology and history.
There are two main protagonists in the novel. Tess is a geochronolgist and a professional time traveler; she is based in California just-past-the-present (in the year 2022), but spends a lot of time in the late nineteenth century. Tess is tough and resourceful, but also deeply troubled. Beth is a teenager in Irvine, California in 1993, who is fascinated by geochronlogy, and also likes to go hear riot grrl bands. Newitz gives us vivid descriptions of a number of such bands, which never actually existed but which really ought to have; this alternative-punk invention is one of the pleasures of the novel. Of course, Tess' and Beth's trajectories intersect over the course of the book; but in the interest of avoiding spoilers, I will not say anything more specific about how this happens.
Aside from the existence of time travel, the biggest difference between the world of the novel and our actual world is that, at least at the start of the novel, abortion is still illegal in the United States both in 1993 and in 2022. The timeline is also different in other subtle but important ways. Reconstruction was not brutally halted in the world of the novel as it was in our own world in the 1870s; and as part of the process, women were given the vote (half a century before they actually attained it) alongside black people. On the other hand, the Victorian backlash against women's sexuality was even more brutal in the world of the novel than it was in ours.
But due to the existence of time travel, all this is subject to revision. Tess and her friends use time travel not just to do scholarly research, but also to change history in various ways. How this is done is one of the main innovations of THE FUTURE OF ANOTHER TIMELINE. Usually in science fiction, the paradoxes of time travel are sidestepped by using the multiple-worlds theory of quantum mechanics. If you change the timeline, in effect you create a new universe that diverges from the previously-existing one, without abolishing it. This allows you, for instance, to go back in time and kill your grandfather without thereby eliminating your own subsequent existence; you still exist in your own timeline, but you also create a different one in which you are never born. The trouble with this approach is that it means that you cannot really change anything; even if you go back and kill Hitler and create a world without the Holocaust, the world in which Hitler and the Holocaust happened continues to exist as well. This is unsatisfactory, because it means that you cannot really ever change things altogether.
But THE FUTURE OF ANOTHER TIMELINE takes a different approach. Here, there is only one timeline. If you succeed in changing things in the past, then the present you return to is altered as well. Only the person who went back and intervened can remember the earlier state of the timeline; everyone else only remembers the past the way it was revised. At one point in the novel -- WARNING: HERE IS A SPOILER THAT I CANNOT AVOID DISCUSSING -- Beth gets pregnant, and has an illegal abortion. Later, after Tess has changed the timeline so that abortions became legal in the late 20th century after all, Beth instead remembers going to a Planned Parenthood clinic for the abortion, which she gets despite being vilified on the way by fundamentalist-Christian extremists. Only Tess knows that abortions used to be illegal in 1993, but became legel back then due to her own "edits" of the timeline. I enjoyed the mind-bending nature of this metahistorical revisionism.
What this leads to is a time-editing war, between feminists and misogynists. Both sides go back to the past in order to change historical outcomes. As the novel traces this history of revisions to history, we go back not only to 1993, but to the famous Chicago world's fair (the Columbian Exhibition) of 1893, to the Nabataean Kingdom of 13 BCE, and even to the Paleozoic Era, when the world was dominated by trilobites. Along the way, Newitz drops a lot of vivid historical references, most of them more or less true of our own world. We meet a number of personalities who really existed in the late 19th century, including the notorious censor Anthony Comstock, and the really cool feminist anarchist Lucy Parsons.
You can read this book as an empowering feminist story -- I don't think I am really giving away a spoiler when I say that the good guys win -- but also as an intensely thoughtful form of speculation (which is what science fiction at its best does). In the course of its rousing story, THE FUTURE OF ANOTHER TIMELINE asks us to think about a number of big subjects. For instance: how does history happen? To what extent do Great Men - or Great Women - make a difference, and to what extent does it depend on collective action? What is possible at any given time, and how are possibilities limited? Do small changes make a difference, as opposed to major historical events? Or another example: how do memory and history work in the case of individual personalities? In the course of the novel, Tess breaks one of her group's main taboos, which is that you aren't supposed to change your own personal timeline; as a result, she suffers greatly from extreme cognitive dissonance.
The novel also makes us think about contingency and precarity. Even when the feminists succeed in changing the timeline for the better, we remain aware that the bad guys could try to change it back. I think this speaks to one of the biggest issues that we are facing today. In order to keep hope alive, we need to have some sort of faith in the possibility of progress. The gains made by people of color, by women, by gays and lesbians, by trans people, and so on, over the past fifty years, give at least some credence to the hope expressed by Martin Luther King, that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." But at a time of Trump and all the other fascistoid leaders in power around the world, and the renewed attacks in the US on fundamental freedoms like abortion rights and voting rights, we must also realize that these victories are precarious, that we can never totally guarantee that they will last, that we cannot take anything for granted, that we must continue struggling and remain vigilant. This is grim, but it is not a counsel of despair: and it is something that we really need to keep in mind in these troubled times. THE FUTURE OF ANOTHER TIMELINE is one of those not-common-enough novels that addresses important questions, and really helps us think about them.

Punk rock, feminism, LQBTQ+ rights, time travel. Sounds like a great combination, right?

The Future of Another Timeline tells the story of Tess and Beth in mostly alternating chapters. Tess is a time traveler from the near future desperately trying to counter a misogynistic cult that wants to destroy women's autonomy. Beth is a teen in the early 90s California punk scene navigating unhealthy relationships with friends and family in addition to normal teenage stuff.

First, the good.

This book is validation for the fear and anger many women, people of color, and members of the LQBTQ+ community have experienced, particularly in the last few years. For me, it was during the Supreme Court Justice confirmation hearings when I realized how fragile my autonomy and safety really were. Women have only had the right to vote for 100 years. We've only been able to legally obtain birth control since 1972, to have credit cards in our own names since 1974, to serve on juries in all 50 US states since 1975, or not get fired from work for being pregnant since 1978. The spectre of that world casts a long shadow, and this book recognizes that there are people out there who are actively trying to take away key elements of our right to self-determination.

Where does time travel come in? In many ways, history is constantly being reinvented and perverted for a variety of ends. This book speaks to that paradoxical nature of history as both immutable and yet always changing-- in this case, because people are literally going back in time to try to change the course of history.

I am excited that these powerful things are being discussed in mainstream sci-fi. However, I really wish the story was stronger. There are some big issues:

• As much as I agree with the politics of this book, I would have really preferred a strategy where the politics are subordinate to a compelling story and fully-fleshed characters who show us rather than tell us. Autonomous, the author's other novel, is an excellent example of this. It becomes very clear that patent law and the pharmaceutical industry are bad, and we learn this by seeing the characters engage with their world and each other rather than primarily from exposition dumps (see below). I think it's a more effective strategy for exploring these ideas and attracting readers who aren't automatically on board with the politics of the book.

• Extensive exposition dumps early in the book rather than strategically sharing information with the reader. After a really stellar introduction, I instantly felt alienated and bored because the main character had to brain dump so much on me about her secret society, how time travel works, etc. There is so much telling instead of showing, and it somehow managed to make time travel and secret societies boring.

• Cardboard villains. The opposition are mostly nameless caricatures with no apparent goals besides enslavement and subjugation of women. I suspect it would be very hard to humanize villains like this, and maybe that should have been an indicator that these aren't compelling villains.

• So much seemingly unnecessary and violent murder here. Perhaps a satire of how misogynists see feminists?

• The extremely specific and yet handwavy nature of time travel. In this world, there are several time travel bases around the world that have existed for thousands of years and researchers make regular use of these to study the past. There are human laws and seemingly technological restrictions dictating the use of the portals, but most of these are broken throughout the book without consequence but are still brought up repeatedly.

• Calling time travel researchers geoscientists. This seemed like a poor choice in terminology--other geoscientists like geologists, geochemists, and biostratigraphers still appear have distinct fields of study in this world, so it was just confusing and it was unclear why another word (chronographer? chronoscientist?) wasn't used. It also kind of seemed like there was a distinction between people who studied human events (sort of like anthropologists or ethnographers) and people who were more invested in the technicalities of time travel. Not fleshing this out seemed like a curious oversight and an indicator of tenuous world-building.

An interesting premise but I kind of got lost within the storyline. As a history student and teacher, revisionism makes me reflect on the way that the world to be. While the book does push for some unintended reflection, I was confused with some of the characters and struggled with caring about their growth. I will say that the author makes the concerted effort to create a bond between the women in this story which was refreshing. The concept is fantastic - but I got lost in the execution. Others however will love this story.

Girl gangs, time travel, feminist heroes...but just wasn't for me. I plan to give it another go and see if it was just my mood, but I it just could not hold my attention.

Annalee Newitz delivers an absorbing tale of two rival groups of time travelers - one is made up of feminist punk visionaries who are trying to change the timeline to allow women in history more freedoms, while the other time traveling group... very much doesn't. They skip through time battling it out in a thoughtful, introspective story that's more concerned with echoes through history than mere action-packed slugfests. Recommended!