Reviews with content warning for Colonisation - The Future of Another Timeline

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.

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