Newitz, Annalee. The Future Of Another Timeline. New York: Tom Doherty, 2019. 347 pages.
Premise: In an alternative present, five “machines” have been discovered hidden in ancient rock formations throughout the globe. By tapping rhythmic sequences into the rocks at these locations, travelers are able to open wormholes to visit the past (though they cannot travel to the future beyond their date of departure). These time machines have been in use for thousands of years, although a series of restrictions limit their use (you have to live within 20 kilometers of a wormhole for 1,680 days, or “four long years”, before one will open for you; the wormholes only transmit bodies and clothing, not tools or technology; access in both ancient times and modern is controlled by a highly structured bureaucracy or priesthood that monitors and regulates travel; etc.) Two teenage girls (Lizzy and Beth) from the early 1990s; their adult selves from the early 2020s; and their companions (past, present, and future) are caught in an “edit war” to rewrite the past and thereby control the present and the future. Against these forces of good (i.e. the feminist, LGBTQIA+ progressive activists seeking to free women, however defined, from the shackles of patriarchy by securing the right to abortion) are arrayed the forces of evil (i.e. the “Comstockers”: a time-travelling army of woman-hating, trans-phobic male chauvinists, headed by the quixotic 19th-century moral crusader Anthony Comstock).
Summary: Given the multiple, overlapping timelines that change as travelers go back and forth to “edit” the past, the plot of FOAT is nearly impossible to synthesize. In 1992 AD, Lizzy and Beth are in Irvine, California, trying to figure out senior year of high school and enjoy the punk rock scene in spite of complications like abusive parents, an unwanted pregnancy, an illegal abortion (since the “Comstockers” have managed to edit the past to make abortion illegal in all 50 states), and applying for college, all the while going on a remarkably successful killing spree of “scumbag” young men who take advantage of young women. In 2022 AD, “Tess”, who is the adult version of one of them, jets back and forth between Flin Flon, Canada, where the newest “machine” was discovered, and her friends with the “Daughters [and nonbinary kin] of Harriet [Tubman]” in California, comparing their memories of alternate timelines to determine what edits have been made by their nemeses and strategize on how to counteract them them. In 1893 AD, Tess and her 19th-century allies Aseel and Sophronia try to force a showdown with Anthony Comstock by putting on a belly dance at the Chicago World’s Fair so titillating that he will feel obligated to try to stop it, and thereby lose all credibility with the Gilded Age elites (who, it turns out, really like belly dances). By discrediting Comstock with his patrons, his influence in the future will be erased and legal access to abortion will be assured. In 13 BC in Raqmu (aka Petra), Jordan, an ancient Nabatean priestesshood of “women and new genders” serving the goddess al-Lat provides a refuge for persecuted women from less enlightened times as well as guarding “timeless” written records from all alternative pasts, providing clues to the edits that have been made in the timeline. In the late Ordovician period (~447.1 million years ago) on the western coast of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwanaland, the Daughters battle a Comstocker who has come back to destroy the Raqmu machine and thereby lock all of history into a bleak, misogynistic future. (Although we are not able to travel forward to visit that future, a visitor from 2534 AD obliquely informs us that women have been divided into sterile “workers” and handless, soon-to-be-headless “queens”, all of whom are slaves of the patriarchal “drones”.)
Analysis: As a Christian, Gentile, heterosexual, pro-life, generally socially conservative, cisgendered white middle-class male, I tick nearly all the boxes of Newitz’s nemeses. This doubtless colored my reading of FOAT. That said, FOAT’s moralistic tone ironically reminded me of the preachy evangelical paperbacks that I read as a child (the Left Behind series comes to mind), with the ironic twist that all the “good guys” in the one were the “bad guys” in the other. FOAT neatly divides the world into the forces of good (defined by their support for abortion) and evil (who oppose abortion). This obsessive dualism creates characters that are more tropes than personalities, and in the process makes for some very uneasy bedfellows.
For starters, there is the chief nemesis, the time-travelling Comstocker Elliot. Elliot and his fellow Comstockers have used the machines to travel back from the 24th century to reverse any historical gains for women’s rights in the hopes of creating a future in which women are permanently subjugated. Given his name, misogyny, vernacular, and general demeanor, Elliot is almost certainly an homage to Elliot Rodgers. In 2014, Rodgers, upset that he was still a virgin at the age of 22, wrote a manifesto and posted multiple videos expressing his anger at the world in general and women in particular for spurning a “perfect gentleman” like him. He then went to a sorority house to attempt a mass shooting in which two women, one man, and Rodgers himself were killed. He has since been adopted as the patron saint of the “incel”, or “involuntary celibate”, movement: a conglomeration of disaffected, antisocial, sexually frustrated young men, particularly active in online forums like 4chan. It is puzzling that Elliot and his comrades would be drawn to a movement called “Celibate4Life” and would devote their lives to the repression of female sexuality given that it was precisely involuntary celibacy that they were trying to escape.
Anthony Comstock—the historical figure who is the book’s nominal nemesis—is even less convincing. Given that the eponymous Comstock Act has recently gained renewed relevance in the fight over abortion-by-mail, it is perhaps unsurprising that Newitz has chosen him for the story’s villain. Nonetheless, it is baffling to consider how Comstock as portrayed here could galvanize any sort of following, much less inspire a time-traveling army of he-man-woman-haters to travel centuries through time to join his crusade against belly dancing and using the US Postal Service to mail birth control and/or dildos. As Newitz portrays him, Comstock resembles nothing so much as Mayor Humdinger of the Paw Patrol: a pudgy, overdressed man with vastly inflated self-importance, ridiculous facial hair, and all the charisma of a baked potato, who makes a fool of himself every time he opens his mouth. The notion that Rodgers and his ilk would find anything in common or inspiring about Comstock, who as a historical figure was concerned with stopping the scourge of masturbation and the sexually exciting material that he believed stimulated it is puzzling to say the least.
In sum, by painting all its antagonists as mindless misogynists motivated by nothing more than a hatred of female empowerment and sexuality, FOAT both loses credibility and misses an opportunity to allow its characters to interact with real people instead of cardboard villains.
The “good people” (definitely not “good guys”, since there seem to be precious few of those) are almost as shallow. The protagonists make for particularly unconvincing serial killers who go about the task of ridding the world of misogynists with little more moral introspection than would be occasioned by swatting so many flies. (That inexperienced high school girls can so successfully pull off so many spontaneous assassinations of well-heeled white men without the police batting an eye also raises eyebrows. Also, the fact that every one of them dies after graphically described penetration with a sharp object, including a broadsword that one just happened to have lying around, gives “revenge porn” a new connotation). The high priestess of the temple of Raqmu, who provides refuge to persecuted women and “new genders” from all ages, powers her “machine” by a retinue of slaves. (This fact passes without comment or condemnation by any of the enlightened goddess-worshippers from the future of the past). The saviors who lead to Comstock’s ultimate defeat are obscenely rich white men who are upset that he has interrupted their private striptease/lap dances, which hardly makes the case for abortion access being a victory for women’s empowerment. By portraying the moral order of the world solely in terms of the struggle for abortion access, FOAT inadvertently exposes the tensions and contradictions inherent to progressive agendas.
Nonetheless, I found a lot to enjoy about this book. Newitz manages to weave together a number very disparate plot elements (prehistoric geology and paleontology, 19th century American social history, late-20th-century punk rock “riot grrrl” culture, 21st-century American gender identity politics) that few if any ever would have thought to combine. As a result, almost everyone who reads this book is going to get an education about something that they had not previously known about or even thought about (although the reader would do well to make sure that the “facts” relayed are from actual history, not one of the book’s “alternative” histories).
FOAT also explores the nature of history in a thought-provoking way. Is history, as Thomas Carlyle opined, nothing “but the biography of great men”, or is it a river of collective action in which “great men” pop up like flotsam and jetsam as the current drags them along? Does history move along a predetermined track so that any attempt to alter it will simply bring it to the same end by a slightly different means, or would a seemingly inconsequential “edit” to the timeline be capable of rerouting the stream to an unforeseen end in a butterfly effect? FOAT’s answers to these questions are incoherent. Still, if you can suspend disbelief hard enough, FOAT’s seems to me more a feature than a bug. Since the only way to answer these questions scientifically would be with our own time machine, for an author to dogmatically claim to know the truth and then use fictional machines to prove it feels like cheating. In the meantime, it does challenge the reader to think about history, one’s place in it, and one’s ability (or lack thereof) to change it.
In conclusion, I suspect that, if Newitz and I sat down to talk, we would agree on next to nothing. However, for me, that was the biggest selling point of the book. In an age where conversations primarily happen in echo chambers and arguments are invariably dismissed with boilerplate rebuttals (or, more commonly, ad hominem epithets), figuring out what someone whom you really disagree with actually thinks can be next to impossible. Fiction provides a forum where you can really see what someone thinks is good (or evil), true (or false), beautiful (or repulsive), and important (or inconsequential). Newitz is clearly writing both from great personal passion and pain. This lends urgency and authenticity to FOAT, and as someone whose experiences and views are very different from the author’s, this clear articulation of a vision of the world so disjointed from mine is a gift. It is just a pity—for the author, as well as the book—that Newitz cannot see past that pain to recognize the shared humanity of both the villains and heroines of Future of Another Timeline.