Tuesday, November 26, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz




The Future of Another Timeline is the second novel by io9 cofounder Annalee Newitz, after their 2017 novel, Autonomous (Review Here).  Autonomous was a fascinating novel with some really interesting ideas about the autonomy (naturally) of humans and artificial intelligences in various situations and circumstances (to go along with a solid plot).  It wasn't a perfect novel, but it was excellent not just for a first novel, but for a SF/F work in general, so naturally I was interested in Newitz' next work and here we are.

The Future of Another Timeline is similar in feel to Autonomous, although with a very different central idea: the concept of fighting for women's and LGBTQ rights against those who would erase those rights/accomplishments, and the meaning of individuals' and groups' fights for changes small and large.  It of course explores this idea through genre - as you can imagine from the title, it's a time travel story, and does so too in a pretty fascinating way, leading again, like Autonomous, to an ending which doesn't suggest easy answers.  It's a strong book, and I think for the most part it has stronger characters than in Newitz' first novel, although it still has some warts along the way.


-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
The Year 2022: In a world in which abortion is illegal - and other women's and LGBTQ rights are threatened, Tess and her friends, the "Daughters of Harriet" work to use time travel to make edits to the timeline to try and secure women's and LGBTQ rights for women in America and elsewhere as early as possible, through influencing events in history.  But Tess and her friends find evidence that they are not the only ones making edits to the timeline: including a group of men who seem determined to curtail the rights of women and others permanently throughout past and future...a group it may take dire measures to stop.

And in the process of editing the timeline, Tess finds herself confronted with a part of her past which, against all rules of time travel, she can't help but try to change.

The Year 1992:  17 Year Old Beth and her friend are at a punk rock concert, when an attempted rape of one of her friends results in them stopping the rape....with lethal force.  The event galvanizes Beth's best friend into taking justice for women - lethal justice - into her own hands, and Beth finds herself more and more worried about where this path is going....along with Beth's own problems stemming from her erratic father who seemingly seeks to control Beth's life.  And so Beth wonders: what future really lies ahead for her, with all that is going on between her friends' actions and her family?
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The Future of Another Timeline takes place in an alternate history - in which 5 artifacts around the world allow for travel throughout time for those with the right qualifications, allowing for people to go back in time - and since these artifacts have seemingly always existed, those time travelers aren't a surprise to the inhabitants of the past.  As such, one of our main protagonists is involved in a literal battle for women's and LGBTQ rights throughout history, against men who are literally trying to erase women's accomplishments and freedom for all time.  It's a fascinating setup - which also hints at some other ideas that are never truly explored (for example, a Cree man who watches one such machine in the past suggests that White people truly don't understand all of the capabilities of the machine that they took from the Native people, but this hinting goes nowhere) - and allows for some interesting explorations of ideas and characters.

In this setting we follow two storylines - first that of Tess, the time traveler, as she mainly goes back in time to try and change history to better women's (and LGBTQ) rights, mainly in this story at a point in America in which a group of women were performing and running a show which was declared as obscene by Anthony Comstock - who tried to shut them down with police authorities...and in this timeline, is being aided by men from the future who seek to shut down women's struggles for rights earlier than ever.  Tess struggles as she tries to support these women from the past so that the future can be better - especially with the goal of achieving her goals without killing anyone.  But Tess also intersects with the second storyline - that of Beth - because that storyline contains her own personal past, which contains a tragedy that Tess is desperate to change, despite being told that to change one's own past can drive one insane.

Beth's story meanwhile, is a lot more personal and ground-level than Tess' story - she and her friends originally just want to finish high school and go to college and get through their lives, all the while enjoying themselves at punk rock concerts and the like.  But Beth faces pressures from within - her father's uneven demands and her mother's firm acquiescence to all of her father's attempts at control - and without, as her friends, particularly her best friend Lizzy, gets involved in taking matters into their own hands against men who lack respect for women....and by getting involved, I mean lethally doing so.  The effect of it all, as well as some other events I'm not going to spoil here, show a real personal tale of struggle for a young woman trying to find herself - really to find any future for herself - in a world that seems crushing her own morals externally and crushing her own freedoms internally.

As I noted earlier, Beth's and Tess's stories do intersect - Tess is obviously a future version of character from Beth's timeline, although its a mystery as to whom - but the two stories are kind of separate in their impacts - Beth's is a more personal story of a woman, while Tess' is a more global struggle for rights in the abstract.  Beth's story works better honestly, but both Beth and Tess are pretty strong characters overall, and Tess' story deals with the obvious issues in some really interesting ways - as does Beth's to an extent - particularly in the use of violence as a tool for making forward change, and the impact of both individuals at driving change as "great men" vs the idea of a collective making strides forwards, and the impacts of "small" changes vs "big" ones.  As with Autonomous, Newitz doesn't give an easy answer to the questions she poses, although there are certainly some suggestions of what Newitz believes, ending in a satisfying if maybe a tiny bit mystifying way - and with a final sentence of a glossary that hits like a heavy punch to the gut.

It's not all a success mind you, just like with Autonomous, Newitz features one character who feels out of place and cliched - in this case, she pops up midway through and feels like she's out of an entirely different book (The Handmaid Tale, in particular) and never quite justifies her existence on top of everything else.  Moreover, and I'm not really sure how to explain this, but Newitz' prose just never really caught my attention as much as other books sometimes do, making the book more of a drag to read for me at least than it should've been.  It's not a pacing problem or anything, and I'm not sure how to explain it honestly, just something about the style that makes it seem a little flat.  Probably a personal quirk, I suppose, but I have to mention it in my review.

Overall though, The Future of Another Timeline is a fascinating book, and I look forward to seeing what Newitz does next - and if this book gets award nominations, as I suspect it might, it won't be undeserved.

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