Oct. 7th, 2019

lightreads: a partial image of a etymology tree for the Indo-European word 'leuk done in white neon on black'; in the lower left is (Default)
The Future of Another Timeline

4/5. Mostly this is about a group of women time travelers engaged in an "edit war" up and down the timeline against men's rights activists, and also partly about teenaged girl spree killers.

Tremendously weird and dense. This is about intersectional feminism and the 90-'s punk scene and being gaslit by history – in this universe, if you make an edit that takes and changes the timeline, you're the only one who remembers the timeline that came before. There's this beautiful/terrible refrain that runs through this book where one woman will say to another something like, "I remember a timeline where abortion is legal."

That's really only touching the surface of this book – it's also about methods of changing time and changing minds, and about salvaging a life out of misery and abuse, and there's this super weird thread about what women become in the future. Basically, this book is a whole lot of ideas flung up there. Only about three quarters of them made sense to me, but that's a pretty good ratio as Newitz goes, at least judging by her last book (the one with all the robot banging).

Content notes: Violence, child abuse, sexual assault.

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