psocoptera (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
psocoptera) wrote2019-11-14 12:28 pm
psocoptera) wrote2019-11-14 12:28 pm
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The Future of Another Timeline
The Future of Another Timeline, Annalee Newitz. Very interesting stuff - might appeal to fans of Ruthanna Emrys' Innsmouth Legacy books, or maybe Gods Monsters and the Lucky Peach. Spoiler cut so I don't have to decide what counts as spoilers:
I think my favorite thing about this book was Newitz's worldbuilding of an Earth that's always had time travel - I can think of various other stories with time agencies and meddling time travelers, but they're usually a secret from the future. The world where everyone knows about travelers is really different and fascinating, and I kind of want a shared-universe anthology set in this world, to really get at a bunch of different perspectives on how people would think about that and what it would or wouldn't change for people. Not that I'm trying to yank Newitz's neat idea away from them but I guess I'm thinking of something like the Machine of Death anthology, sometimes you get interesting takes on something from letting people play with something. The profound, geologic ancient-ness of the sites, and the matter-of-fact bureaucracies and industries that have grown around them, were really well realized.
The ethics were also interesting - "sure, you could kill predatory/gross dudes, but you'd feel shitty about it later and you'd miss out on better things you could be doing, so save the killing for when it's really urgent" was not exactly something I'd heard before but is an interesting take.
It was a little weird for me that I was personally 15 in southern California in 1993 and yet those segments felt just as foreign as the 1893 parts. I don't know, I guess I did know one person in high school who was going to concerts, a few years later... had that punk aesthetic...
I loved the implication of there being a lot more going on that we weren't quite getting. Morehshin maybe implies that the whole theory of timeline revision wasn't quite right, and Seacake implies that the indigenous people near Flin Flon know how to travel forward in time, although maybe he's just fucking with Tess.
I'm intrigued by this book as maybe part of a trend about small informal collectives trying to take limited or local sustainable altruistic action. Like, there are plenty of handfuls of people trying to stop a particular catastrophe, or people in official power structures (captains, cops) pursuing social goods, but not so many activist/organizer types whose plan is to repeatedly fight battles as a lifestyle thing. I kind of want to connect it to Perihelion Summer, although there is a catastrophe there, but not one that can be averted, so it's a story about a small group who's organized themselves to adapt and survive, or, like I said, Innsmouth Legacy, which I think is doing some interesting stuff with found-family as like a nexus for social change. I don't know this isn't a thought I've formulated very well yet, but I feel like there's maybe something in post-2016 fiction that wasn't so much in sff before about The Struggle as a permanent and ongoing state of being. Need to think more about this.
My gut sense is that we won't see it on the awards ballots? Although who knows, and I'm not sure what I think we will see, haven't read enough stuff this year yet. I'll consider it for nominating, depending on what else I've got.
I think my favorite thing about this book was Newitz's worldbuilding of an Earth that's always had time travel - I can think of various other stories with time agencies and meddling time travelers, but they're usually a secret from the future. The world where everyone knows about travelers is really different and fascinating, and I kind of want a shared-universe anthology set in this world, to really get at a bunch of different perspectives on how people would think about that and what it would or wouldn't change for people. Not that I'm trying to yank Newitz's neat idea away from them but I guess I'm thinking of something like the Machine of Death anthology, sometimes you get interesting takes on something from letting people play with something. The profound, geologic ancient-ness of the sites, and the matter-of-fact bureaucracies and industries that have grown around them, were really well realized.
The ethics were also interesting - "sure, you could kill predatory/gross dudes, but you'd feel shitty about it later and you'd miss out on better things you could be doing, so save the killing for when it's really urgent" was not exactly something I'd heard before but is an interesting take.
It was a little weird for me that I was personally 15 in southern California in 1993 and yet those segments felt just as foreign as the 1893 parts. I don't know, I guess I did know one person in high school who was going to concerts, a few years later... had that punk aesthetic...
I loved the implication of there being a lot more going on that we weren't quite getting. Morehshin maybe implies that the whole theory of timeline revision wasn't quite right, and Seacake implies that the indigenous people near Flin Flon know how to travel forward in time, although maybe he's just fucking with Tess.
I'm intrigued by this book as maybe part of a trend about small informal collectives trying to take limited or local sustainable altruistic action. Like, there are plenty of handfuls of people trying to stop a particular catastrophe, or people in official power structures (captains, cops) pursuing social goods, but not so many activist/organizer types whose plan is to repeatedly fight battles as a lifestyle thing. I kind of want to connect it to Perihelion Summer, although there is a catastrophe there, but not one that can be averted, so it's a story about a small group who's organized themselves to adapt and survive, or, like I said, Innsmouth Legacy, which I think is doing some interesting stuff with found-family as like a nexus for social change. I don't know this isn't a thought I've formulated very well yet, but I feel like there's maybe something in post-2016 fiction that wasn't so much in sff before about The Struggle as a permanent and ongoing state of being. Need to think more about this.
My gut sense is that we won't see it on the awards ballots? Although who knows, and I'm not sure what I think we will see, haven't read enough stuff this year yet. I'll consider it for nominating, depending on what else I've got.
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Thanks,
-V.
no subject