The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz
"1992: After a confrontation at a riot grrl concert, seventeen-year-old Beth finds herself in a car with her friend's abusive boyfriend dead in the backseat, agreeing to help her friends hide the body. This murder sets Beth and her friends on a path of escalating violence and vengeance as they realize many other young women in the world need protecting too.
2022: Determined to use time travel to create a safer future, Tess has dedicated her life to visiting key moments in history and fighting for change. But rewriting the timeline isn’t as simple as editing one person or event. And just when Tess believes she's found a way to make an edit that actually sticks, she encounters a group of dangerous travelers bent on stopping her at any cost.
Tess and Beth’s lives intertwine as war breaks out across the timeline--a war that threatens to destroy time travel and leave only a small group of elites with the power to shape the past, present, and future. Against the vast and intricate forces of history and humanity, is it possible for a single person’s actions to echo throughout the timeline?"
“Collective action means that when someone does something small or personal, their actions can change history too.”
― Annalee Newitz, The Future of Another Timeline
This book was such a wild ride. At times it was so beautiful and others it was painful and hard to read. In the end, it was such an inspiration that we CAN make a change, even if the current political climate is grim. But it takes a lot of people standing up and saying this is wrong and doing something about it to make those changes. I also really enjoyed how scientific this story was. Even if I didn’t understand all of it, it made it feel like this was real. And it grounded it in a way that helped bring home that making big changes isn’t just for some far off sci-fi utopia. And it really drove home how important it is that we vote for the change we want to see in the world.
Definitely take special note of content warnings below because this wasn’t, by any means, a light read. It could be really heavy and painful at times. There were some pretty terrible and brutal scenes. But it was also hopeful and about changing things for the better. It was about the profound effects small changes can have for ordinary people. If you’re able to, I highly recommend reading this one.
Genre: sci-fi, lgbtqia+
Representation: lesbian/queer, non-binary, trans
Content Warnings: Abortion, Anti-Asian racism, Antisemitism, Assault, Attempted Rape, Murder, Pedophilia, Transphobic Murder