Book Review: Future of Another Timeline - Annalee Newitz

A story of time travel, murder, and unlikely allies separated by centuries, battling for a world in which anyone can change the future. 1992: Beth, a teenage riot grrl, witnesses a murder and realizes something is deeply wrong with her life--maybe it's her best friend, maybe it's her dad, or maybe it's the strange woman who keeps trying to warn her about what's coming. 2022: Tess, a time-traveling geologist, journeys to different eras for her research, while secretly hoping to correct a mistake from her past that haunts her still. Their lives become mysteriously intertwined as war breaks out across the timeline--a war that threatens to destroy time travel, leaving only a small group of elites with the power to shape the past, present, and future.

Well! This is a treat!

I thought this might just be an extended riff on Desmond Warzel's Wikihistory - a decade-old piece of micro-fiction about time travelling Wikipedia editors. But this is so much more than that!

Much like "This Is How You Lose the Time War" - this is an impossibly good slice of chronojumping sci-fi. And it also uses a similar device of alternating chapters between our protagonists.

It's a joyous book of gal-pals teaming through time, putting right what once went wrong, and getting up to all sorts of shenanigans. Has good "hard" sci-fi roots - dealing with paradoxes via merge-conflicts - and examines the social implications of generally available time travel. It presents (as the title suggests) a terrifying vision of what our future could have been. There's also a lovely section about what pronouns to use when you meet yourself.

Well worth picking up and diving in.