A review by afestivalaparade
The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

dark emotional hopeful informative tense fast-paced
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."
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