The Future of Another Timeline
- by Annalee Newitz
- Novel
- Science Fiction
- Adults
- Definite Time Travel
- English
- The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz (Tor, September 2019).
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.
Tags
(21)
- Time Periods
- Paleozoic Era (541 Ma to 252 Ma): Actually a series of stops at 200,000 year intervals back to 500 Ma., plus an accidental trip to the Ordovician.
- Circa AD 1800 to 1899: World Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893
- Circa AD 1970 to 1999: Young Tess and her friends in the early 1990s
- Circa AD 2000 to 2099: Tess’s adult period, 2022
- 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.”
- 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.”
- Sensing Unfamiliar Timelines: “There were many events that existed only in our memories because we’d been present for the edits.”
- Time Travel Methods
- Big Time Machines: The Tapper Machines
- Time Rifts: The Tapper Machines open a wormhole through time.
- Themes
- Cannot Return to 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
Variants
(2)
- The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz (Tor, September 2019).
- audio reading.
The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz (MacMillan Audio, September 2019).
Translations
(1)
- Italian (possibly subtitled or dubbed).
Il futuro di un altro tempo by Annalee Newitz (Fanucci Editore, January 2021).