Reviews with content warning for Abortion - Il futuro di un altro tempo

Whoaaaa, what a wild ride. I was not expecting such a raucous and wild feminist time traveling adventure, but wow am I glad I picked this book up. The setting is unique for time travel, and I loved the deep dive into Gilded Age America. I absolutely loved the deep philosophical dives into historical agency; they are conversations one doesn't normally find in time travel books and I am much more interested in liberal arts than the science of science fiction. (It's great to see studying history get its due.) I wish I had gotten to see more of the best friend's outcome; that thread dropped a bit in the fuzziness that endings to time travel stories usually require.

I especially loved punk rock 1890s Chicago. The Gilded Age is a fascinating transitional time for the US, and one of my favorite eras. It's so thrilling to see Newitz is fascinated by the same themes I am: a country on the cusp of modernism, struggling mightily to define itself in a way that is completely orthogonal to its actual lived reality. Watching a country try to reinvent its past is timely story, one that becomes literal in this story. Comstock is absolutely a villain, and absolutely as over the top as he's portrayed in the book.

The book goes to great lengths to highlight diversity, in the 1890s, 1990s, and 2020s. There are a few places that call out the need for intersectionality... Which makes the ending of the book a bit politically disappointing.

The saving of our real-life present feels so triumphant that it's easy to forget the threat to reproductive rights is still very real today, and even more so in countries outside the US. Some characters gesture at how the edit war is neverending, but Tess's story ends with the success of creating our current world -- and so it feels conclusive to the reader as well. I wish the effects of time edits rippled outside of the US, or more space was made for the other Harriet scientists to plan their next steps after celebrating their success. Instead, I was left with an odd feeling of "they did it! Hooray! They saved the day and made the world better! ...wait this world sucks too."

Content Warnings

courtneyfalling's review against another edition

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dark mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

Okay, this book was a wild trip. I was so enamored by the concept: I heard about it in a BookTube video and picked up a copy from my library literally the next day. But by and large while reading, I was unsure how to feel. I was pulled in even as I was kept at arms' length. I had so many swirling reactions.

Biggest piece of advice: Read the content warnings.

Specific notes:

I really like Beth's character. I felt so personally drawn to her, to how she reacted to trauma and how she imagined her future.
This was one of the most real and harrowing descriptions of a volatile father I've ever seen, and as someone who shares a lot of those experiences with Beth, I did have to pause after many of her chapters and take a breath. I do like where her story ended up, but definitely very heavy.
I did not see that twist coming, holy shit! Just had to totally reassess how I had viewed Tess's backstory up to that point. But it was pulled off pretty well and set up the ending.
I do like how Tess's story ended up, but for most of the novel, she just frustrated me. She's terrible at taking the information she's learned while traveling and actually incorporating it into her actions at all.
The scene where she goes to the Lady Managers to set up a cultural tea is so cringy. Why would she just expect sudden sisterhood? It's so historically unbased and represents a real lack of intersectional feminist awareness at her core, beyond the right terms or basic frameworks, at a real fundamental and personal level. Also, when she first shows up to the Expo, she immediately fucks up and tells Aseel her whole, half-baked plan. You're telling me she's traveled so much and become so important and well-known across history with absolutely zero social awareness or cover-up skills? I didn't believe how blank she was.
Morehshin's character comes in really suddenly and we never get to learn much about her. I honestly could've done without her... she felt too thrown in without the proper context setting.
I wanted more murder. There's a lot of time spent feeling guilty about violence or theorizing about how violence is never truly justified, but the book fails to truly back up why violence doesn't work or why it's overshadowed by its immorality, especially for the first half of the book while establishing how Tess doesn't use violence.
I'm honestly glad Tess ended up returning to her roots as a killer; at that point even the unequivocal embrace of bloodthirsty killing felt better than the moralistic anti-violence line that took over so much of the book.
Upon meeting one of the world's crappiest, most one-dimensional villains, Tess notes how his birth year, 2379, makes him "a contemporary of Berenice's killer." But that chapter where we briefly meet Berenice's would-be killer is from Enid's perspective, and Enid never fully shares what happened when she gets back to 2022. It actually seemed like she was purposefully not mentioning how futuristic these villains truly were. So how does Tess know, and why is it such a minor deal to her that it's only coming up now? Bad communication-related plot hole.
I feel like this book's feminism often tried to rope in trans women and nonbinary folks without fully, fundamentally rethinking its concepts of "feminine" bodies and power. There were some scenes about the Divine Feminine that strayed a little toward bioessentialist, and a lot of the book focused on reproductive rights (and specifically reproductive rights, not reproductive justice). Which is extra frustrating because the author is nonbinary! And I really wanted these issues to be handled with a little more nuance and centering of trans women and nonbinary folks specifically.
Beyond a few jokes about the elaborate hell that is tenure review, this book doesn't really unpack how its characters navigate their status within a university even as they try to adapt and subvert how they're using their funding. At points, it sets up university education as a site of automatic and only forward progress, like access to the university is the main issue, not the deeper power dynamics of economic authority, institutional and cultural sway, knowledge definition, and land and resource theft that universities bank on.