Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning journalist, editor, and author ANNALEE NEWITZ for a discussion of their latest novel, The Future of Another Timeline. They will be joined in conversation by celebrated poet and critic STEPHANIE BURT.
1992: After a confrontation at a riot grrl concert, seventeen-year-old Beth finds herself in a car with her friend’s abusive boyfriend dead in the backseat, agreeing to help her friends hide the body. This murder sets Beth and her friends on a path of escalating violence and vengeance as they realize many other young women in the world need protecting too.
2022: Determined to use time travel to create a safer future, Tess has dedicated her life to visiting key moments in history and fighting for change. But rewriting the timeline isn’t as simple as editing one person or event. And just when Tess believes she’s found a way to make an edit that actually sticks, she encounters a group of dangerous travelers bent on stopping her at any cost.
Tess and Beth’s lives intertwine as war breaks out across the timeline—a war that threatens to destroy time travel and leave only a small group of elites with the power to shape the past, present, and future. Against the vast and intricate forces of history and humanity, is it possible for a single person’s actions to echo throughout the timeline?
“The Future of Another Timeline is the mind-blowing punk feminist sci-fi time traveling thriller you’ve been waiting for, and which our culture desperately needs. Packed with action, sass, righteousness, technology and danger, it just might be a perfect book.” ―Michelle Tea, author of Black Wave
“Few stories are as smart, as nuanced, as exciting, and as unsettling as this one. . . engrossing and impactful.” ―Karen Joy Fowler, bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
“The Future of Another Timeline does brilliantly what SF does best: makes metaphor concrete to illuminate the human condition. In this case, the idea that women are consistently written out of history by men is turned into a visceral reality, and secret history becomes a thrilling secret war.” ―Nicola Griffith, author of Hild
Certain books were “banned in Boston” at least as far back as 1651, when one William Pynchon wrote a book criticizing Puritanism.