the future of another timeline by annalee newitz

For one thing, major events can’t be altered, so the actual effects on history result from the accumulation of smaller edits, whose results can’t easily be predicted.

The question of whose history gets suppressed and whose doesn’t is one of the central questions of the novel, making it eerily timely for our own cultural debates.īut editing history isn’t as simple as either group would like to believe. Meanwhile, the Daughters of Harriet, who advocate not only for women but for the LGBTQ community, try to foil them at various key points in history. The Comstockers are out to alter history to prevent all progress in women’s rights to lock in their own “Handmaid’s Tale” version of toxic masculinity. The main struggle is between a racially and gender-diverse group of future feminists calling themselves the Daughters of Harriet - named for Harriet Tubman, who in their timeline had become a famous senator - and the “Comstockers,” followers of the notorious postal censor and self-righteous 19th-century moral crusader Anthony Comstock (after whom George Bernard Shaw coined the contemptuous term “Comstockery”).

But science fiction, from Isaac Asimov and Poul Anderson to “Back to the Future,” has often asked what if we could really change the past, and thus the present, using the magic of time travel? At their best, such stories combine the appeal of good historical fiction with futuristic speculation, which is certainly the case with Annalee Newitz’s provocative second novel, following her 2017 “Autonomous.” Set partly in the punk Southern California of 1992, partly in a somewhat ominous and slightly dystopian 2022, and partly in other historical eras - mostly Chicago in 1893 - it outlines a near-epic battle for control of the timelines (none of which, by the way, are our own). “Editing the past” commonly means rewriting the narrative to celebrate certain people or values and - sometimes - to render others almost invisible.

The future of another timeline by annalee newitz