Review: The Future of Another Timeline, by Annalee Newitz

[Russ Allbery]

The Future of Another Timeline
by Annalee Newitz

Publisher: Tor
Copyright: September 2019
ISBN:      0-7653-9212-7
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     350

Tess is a time traveler from 2022, a member of the semi-secret
Daughters of Harriet who are, under the cover of an academic research
project, attempting to modify the timeline to improve women's rights in
the United States. Beth is a teenager in suburban Irvine in Alta
California, with an abusive father, a tight-knit group of friends, and
a love of feminist punk rock. The story opens with both of them at a
Grape Ape concert in 1992. Beth is hanging out with her friends, and
Tess is looking for signs of a conspiracy to alter the timeline to
further restrict the rights of women.

The Future of Another Timeline has a great science fiction premise.
There are time machines buried in geologically-stable bedrock that have
been there since before any current species evolved. The first was
discovered by humans thousands of years before the start of the story.
They can be controlled with vibrations in the rock and therefore don't
need any modern technology to operate. Humanity has therefore lived
with time travel for much of recorded history, albeit with a set of
rules strictly imposed by these mysterious machines: individuals can
only travel to their own time or earlier, and cannot carry any
equipment with them. The timeline at the start of the book is already
not ours, and it shifts further over the course of the plot.

Time travel has a potentially devastating effect on the foundations of
narrative, so most SF novels that let the genie of time travel out of
the bottle immediately start trying to stuff it back in again. Newitz
does not, which is a refreshing change. The past is not immutable,
there is no scientific or magical force that prevents history from
changing, and people do not manage to keep something with a history of
thousands of years either secret or well-controlled. It's not a
free-for-all: There is a Chronology Academy that sets some rules for
time travelers, the Machines themselves have rules that prevent time
travel from being too casual, and most countries have laws about what
time travelers are allowed to do. But it's also not horribly difficult
to travel in time, not horribly uncommon to come across someone from
the future, and most of the rules are not strictly enforced.

This does mean there are some things that one has to agree to not think
about. (To take the most obvious example, the lack of government and
military involvement in time travel is not believable, even given its
constraints. One has to accept this as a story premise.) But it removes
the claustrophobic rules-lawyering that's so common in time travel
stories and lets Newitz tell a more interesting political story about
the difficulty of achieving lasting social change.

Unfortunately, this is also one of those science fiction novels that is
much less interested in its premise and machinery than I was as a
reader. The Machines are fascinating objects: ancient, mysterious, and
as we learn more about them over the course of the story, rich with
intriguing detail. After reading this summary, you're probably curious
where they came from, what they can do, and how they work. So am I,
after reading the book. The Future of Another Timeline is completely
uninterested in that or any related question. About halfway through the
book, a time traveler from the future demonstrates interfaces in the
time machines that no one knew existed, the characters express some
surprise, and then no one asks any meaningful questions for the rest of
the book. At another point, the characters have the opportunity to see
a Machine in something closer to its original form before aspects of
its interface have eroded away. They learn just enough to solve their
immediate plot problem and show no further curiosity.

I found this immensely frustrating, in part due to the mixed signaling.
Normally if an author is going to use a science fiction idea as pure
plot device, they avoid spending much time on it, implicitly warning
the reader that this isn't where the story is going. Newitz instead
provides the little details and new revelations that normally signal
that understanding these objects will be a key to the plot, and then
shrugs and walks away, leaving every question unanswered.

Given how many people enjoyed Rendezvous with Rama, this apparently
doesn't bother other readers as much as it bothers me. If you are like
me, though, be warned.

But, fine, this is a character story built around a plot device rather
than a technology story. That's a wholly valid mode of science fiction,
and that part of the book has heft. It reminded me of the second-wave
feminist science fiction of authors like Russ and Charnas, except
updated to modern politics. The villains are a projection forward of
the modern on-line misogynists (incels, specifically), but Newitz makes
the unusual choice of not focusing on their motives or interior lives.
They simply exist as a malevolent hostile force, much the way that
women experience them today on-line. They have to be defeated, the
characters of the book set out to defeat them, and this is done without
melodrama, hand-wringing, or psychoanalysis. It's refreshingly
straightforward and unambiguous, and it keeps the focus on the people
trying to make the world a better place rather than on the redemption
arc of some screaming asshole.

The part I was less enamored of is that these are two of the least
introspective first-person protagonists that I've seen in a book.
Normally, first-person perspective is used to provide a rich internal
monologue about external events, but both Tess and Beth tell their
stories as mostly-dry sequences of facts. Sometimes this includes a bit
of what they're feeling, but neither character delves much into the why
or how. This improves somewhat towards the end of the book, but I found
the first two-thirds of the story oddly flat and had a hard time
generating much interest in or sympathy for the characters. There are
good in-story reasons for both Tess and Beth to heavily suppress their
emotions, so I will not argue this is unrealistic, but character
stories work better for me with more of an emotional hook.

Hand-in-hand with that is the problem that the ending didn't provide
the catharsis that I was hoping for. Beth goes through absolute hell
over the course of the book, and while that does reach a resolution
that I know intellectually is the best type of resolution that her
story can hope for, it felt wholly insufficient. Tess's story reaches a
somewhat more satisfying conclusion, but one that reverses an earlier
moral imperative in a way that I found overly sudden. And everything
about this book is highly contingent and temporary in a way that is
true to its theme and political statement but that left me feeling more
weary than satisfied.

That type of ending is a valid authorial choice, and to some extent my
complaint is only that this wasn't the book for me at the time I read
it. But I have read other books with similarly conditional endings and
withdrawn characters that still carried me along with the force and
power of the writing (Daughters of the North comes to mind). The Future
of Another Timeline is not poorly written, but neither do I think it
achieves that level of skill. The writing is a bit wooden, the flow of
sentences is a touch cliched and predictable, and the characters are a
bit thin. It's serviceable writing had there been something else (such
as a setting-as-character exploration of the origins and purpose of the
Machines) to grab my attention and pull me along. But if the weight of
the story has to be born by the quality of the writing, I don't think
it was quite up to the task.

Overall, I think The Future of Another Timeline has a great premise
that it treats with frustrating indifference, a satisfyingly different
take on time travel with some obvious holes, some solid political ideas
reminiscent of an earlier age of feminist SF, a refreshing
unwillingness to center evil on its own terms, characters that took
more than half the book to develop much depth, and a suitable but
frustrating ending. I can see why other people liked it more than I
did, but I can't recommend it.

Content warning: Rape, graphic violence, child abuse, gaslighting,
graphic medical procedure, suicide, extreme misogyny, and mutilation,
and this is spread throughout the book, not concentrated in one scene.
I'm not very squeamish about non-horror fiction and it was still rather
a lot, so please read with care.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-02-07

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-7653-9212-7.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>