The verdict
One of the better uses of time travel in recent science fiction, because it treats the past as something still being fought over rather than a fixed museum. Read it for the argument.
Quick facts
- Author
- Annalee Newitz
- First published
- 2019
- Series
- Standalone
- Genre
- Alternate history, time travel science fiction
- Best for
- Readers who want time travel used as a political argument
- Skip it if
- You want airtight time-travel rules or an apolitical story
Author Annalee Newitz
The Future of Another Timeline is a time-travel novel about editing history, and about how much of the present rests on fights that were won and could be lost again. It is told by two narrators thirty years apart, and the war they are caught up in is fought through the past.
The idea behind it
Most time-travel fiction treats the past as scenery or as a puzzle. This one treats it as contested ground. If history can be changed, then the rights people have today were not inevitable and are not permanent, and there are people on both sides of that realisation actively editing the record.
On one side are the Daughters of Harriet, a group working to make the future better for women, and among them is Tess, a professional time traveller and geoscientist who moves through the past as a job rather than an accident. On the other side is a rival organisation pushing in the opposite direction, and the result is not a single dramatic intervention but a long, attritional campaign run through ordinary decades.
That is the book’s real argument, and it is a good one: progress is not a slope, it is a position that has to be held. Weaving the campaign through a teenage narrator’s life in 1992 keeps it human. Beth is not a historian and not a soldier. She is a young woman growing up inside a version of the timeline that other people are quietly arguing over, and the gap between what she experiences and what is being fought for is where the novel does its best work.
The story, spoiler-light
The book alternates between Tess’s travels and Beth’s adolescence, and the two strands pull towards each other as the campaign escalates. Tess’s sections are the machinery: how the group operates, what a change costs, and what an edit to one decade does to the next. Beth’s sections are the cost. The reader is asked to hold both at once, and the structure is deliberate rather than decorative.
There is violence in it, including violence against women, and the book does not look away from why that matters to the plot. It is also, in places, an angry novel, which is appropriate given what it is about. It is not a grim one, though. The relationships between the time travellers, and the friendship and love inside them, keep the book from becoming a lecture.
If you go in expecting a clean paradox puzzle, you will be looking at the wrong part of the painting. The rules here are loose and the book is not interested in policing them. It is interested in what people do with the ability.
What makes it science fiction
The speculative hinge is the ability to move through time and change it, and the book treats that as a political technology rather than a scientific one. Nobody spends long on how the machine works. What matters is who has access to it, what they are trying to achieve, and how the changes accumulate.
The geoscience detail is a nice touch, since Tess’s professional knowledge of how landscapes change over long periods is exactly the skill a time traveller would want. It gives the mechanics a specific texture and keeps the travellers from feeling like generic operatives.
Who should read it, and who should give it a miss
- Read it if you want time travel used as a political argument rather than a puzzle.
- Read it if you like novels with two narrators whose stories converge.
- Read it if you want a book with something to say about how rights are won and lost.
- Give it a miss if you want airtight, consistent time-travel rules. They are not the point.
- Give it a miss if you prefer your science fiction apolitical. This one is not.
Where to start, and what to read next
This is a standalone, so there is nothing to read first. If you like it, Annalee Newitz’s other science fiction is the natural next step, and it shares the same interest in people living inside systems that are larger than they are.
For the time-travel-as-politics angle, the comparisons worth making are the classic paradoxical time-travel novels, all of which are more interested in mechanics than this one is. What Newitz is doing is closer to an alternate-history novel that happens to be mobile.
The verdict
The Future of Another Timeline is one of the better uses of time travel in recent science fiction, because it treats the past as something people are still fighting over rather than as a fixed museum. The two-narrator structure works, the argument is sharp, and the politics are inseparable from the plot rather than bolted on.
Read it if you want a time-travel novel with a position. It is angry, it is warm in places, and it is not interested in being neutral.
Frequently asked questions
Is it a standalone?
Yes. There is no series and no prior reading.
Do the time-travel rules make sense?
They are deliberately loose. The book is about the consequences of changing history, not about the mechanics of doing so.
Is it a difficult read?
No. It alternates between two narrators and two eras, which asks you to pay attention, but the prose is direct. Some of the content is heavy, including violence against women.