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The Future of Another Timeline

by Annalee Newitz
Tess is a geologist (because, of course, geologists control the time travel of the giant ancient machines) and a member of the Daughters of Harriet (Senator Harriet Tubman, that is, from 19th-century Mississippi). On the surface, the Daughters are time travel scholars, but in reality, Tess and her fellow Daughters are fighting a pitched changewar for women’s rights against the oppressors known as the Comstockers. One more thing: While she’s at it,Tess also hopes to also save the souls of her teenaged self and her underground feminist punk friends in the 1990s, with a particular focus on their vigilante killing spree and young Beth’s abortion.
— Michael Main
All five Machines had limitations, but the hardest to surmount was what travelers call the Long Four Years. Wormholes only opened for people who remained within twenty kilometers of a Machine for at least 1,680 days.
DEBUT
The Future of Another Timeline (Tor, September 2019).
VARIANTS
2 English variants
TRANSLATIONS
Translations to Italian
TAGS(SPOILERS!)
Time Periods Timeline Models
  • Outside of Time: “There were hundreds of these [archive] caves, dug into the soft sandstone of the city’s canyon walls. Somehow, they could prevent written documents from changing with the timeline.”
  • Remembering Different Timelines: “There were many events that existed only in our memories because we’d been present for the edits.”
  • Resilient Timeline: “Geoscientists of the early twentieth-first century eventually settled on the theory that small things change but big things don’t. Trying to cause a significant divergence in the timeline was simply bad science, a honeypot for fools and failing tyrants. It was also against Chronology Academy regulations.”
Time Travel Methods Themes
  • Cannot Return to Time Where You Already Exist: You may visit a time where your non-traveling self is, but you can’t revisit a time that you’ve previously visited (i.e., a time that you’ve “burned”).
  • Caution! Do Not Destroy Spacetime Continuum!: “Nobody knew what happened to travelers who met their younger selves; it was both illegal and so morally offensive that most scholars avoided the topic. The only detailed description came from a medieval manuscript about the life of an old, impoverished traveler who took the Machine back thirty years to advise himself to save money. When he returned to his present, the traveler found that his house had become a beautiful mansion. But then his bones began to break themselves, and he was plagued by attacks from a cloud of tiny demons that flew around his head unceasingly.”
  • Changewars: The “edit war”: Daughters of Harriet, the Comstockers, et al.
  • Fast-Forwarding Time: Back in the Ordovician, Tess et al. fast-forward, looking for the Comstockers at the Raqmu controls.
  • Future Is “Up”: “I never should have come back upstream from 1893.”
  • Self-Visitation: “I kept searching for lost self until the spotlights poured illumination across the steeply angled seats and I caught a brief glimpse of her—me—with my two best friends at the time.”
  • Time Corps: The Chronology Academy
  • Time Travel Sickness, Injuries, and Mixed-Up Body Parts: “I know. It was stupid. But it seemeed . . . I don’t know. I thought it would be okay. But it wasn’t/ And now I feel really, really awful. I’m in a lot of pain.”
  • True Histories: The true history of the Algerian village at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition (and other events)
Real-World Tags
TIME TRAVEL ITINERARY (SPOILERS!)
  1. From the Canadian Machine on the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border, 2022 ⋙ to the Canadian Machine, summer 1992. Round trip. Note: Chapters 1 and 3: Tess’s trip to California where she first sees her youngers self at a concert.
  2. From the Canadian Machine, 2022 ⋙ to the Canadian Machine, April 1893. Note: Chapter 5: Tess goes to to the 1893 Exposition in Chicago, where she stays until a later trip (initially seen in Chapter 10) to 1992, then 2022, then back to 1893.
  3. From the Canadian Machine, summer 1893 ⋙ to the Canadian Machine, 1992. Note: Chapters 10, 13 and 14: Tess takes a long side trip to 1992, going down to California to warn Beth about Lizzy.
  4. From the Canadian Machine, 2022 ⋙ to the Canadian Machine, 1992. Round trip. Note: Chapter 12: Meanwhile, Delilah and Enid hop from 2022 down to 1992 in order to save Berenice in North Carolina from a traveler from 2365.
  5. From the Canadian Machine, 1992 ⋙ to the Canadian Machine, 447.1 Ma, the Ordovician (unintentionally and briefly). Note: Chapter 14: Tess, trying to get back to 2022.
  6. From an unknown time ⋙ to the Canadian Machine, 2022. Note: Chapter 14: Tess, escaping from outside of time to her destination of 2022. ”Terrified, I stumbled toward the cave entrance, which sucked me back into the wormhole’s familiar nothingness.”
  7. From an unspecified Machine, 2734 ⋙ to the same unspecified Machine, 2022. Note: Chapter 14: The plot thickens as Morehshin arrives from the future. “I didn’t come to change a few laws in the United States, or study the price of meat. This is something bigger.”
  8. From the Canadian Machine, 2022 ⋙ to the Canadian Machine, 1893. Note: End of Chapter 14: Tess takes Morehshin back to the Exposition in the key time of 1893.
  9. From the Jordan Machine, Raqmu, summer 2022 ⋙ to the Jordan Machine, a series of times going backward from AD 670 in 200,000 year increments back to about 500 Ma.. Round trip. Note: Chapter 22: Meanwhile, C. L. launches a research project in the past.
  10. From the Jordan Machine, Raqmu, summer 1893 ⋙ to the Jordan Machine, 447.1 Ma, the Ordovician (unintentionally and briefly). Note: Chapter 23: Tess, Morehshin, and their posse.
  11. From an unknown time ⋙ to the Jordan Machine, 13 BC. Note: Chapter 23: Fortunately, there’s a return-to-last-set-destination dance, so Tess et al. do get to their destination of the Nabataean Kingdom.
  12. From the Jordan Machine, Raqmu, summer 1893 ⋙ to the Jordan Machine, 1993. Round trip. Note: Chapters 24 and 25: Tess snuck out of bed in the Nabataean Kingdom to bribe some ancient tappers to send her to 1993 so she can save Beth from suicide.
  13. From the Jordan Machine, 13 BC ⋙ to the Jordan Machine, Raqmu, summer 1893. Note: Chapter 25: Tess et al. (sans Soph) return to 1893 to deal with the Comstockers.
  14. From the Canadian Machine, 1991 ⋙ to the Canadian Machine, the 1860s. Round trip. Note: Chapter 27: Meanwhile, from a memoir, we learn that Anita traveled to Mississippi in the 1860s via the Canadian Machine.
  15. From the Canadian Machine, 1991 ⋙ to the Canadian Machine, the 1790s. Round trip. Note: Chapter 27: And she took a second research trip to Haiti in the 1790s.
  16. From the Jordan Machine, 1894 ⋙ to the Jordan Machine, 447.1 Ma., the Ordovician (on purpose). Note: Chapter 30: Tess, Morehshin, Anita, and C. L. head back to confront the Comstockers at the site of their nefarious activities.
  17. From an unknown time ⋙ to the Jordan Machine, starting at a fixed spot circa 447.1 Ma, just before the Hirnantian stage of the Ordovician Period. Note: Chapter 30: The group fast-forwards through time circa 447.1 Ma., looking for the Comstockers at the Raqmu controls.
  18. From an unknown time ⋙ to the Jordan Machine, 2022. Note: Chapter 32: The group returns, or at least some of them (C. L. is not mentioned until a week later). A mention is also made of a trip to the fourth century BC, but no details are given.
  19. From the Jordan Machine, 2022 ⋙ to the Jordan Machine, 10 BC. Note: Chapter 32: Anita and Tess, “three years after wed left Soph at the Temple” [incorrectly identified as still being 13 BC].