New Books In Science Fiction

Amid a wave of time travel books published this year, Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline(Tor, 2019) stands out for its focus on a woman’s right to obtain a safe abortion.The book opens in an alternate America in which women gained the right to vote in the 1870s (rather than 1920), but abortion never became legal.“I was imagining that if women had gotten the vote earlier, there might have been a backlash, which would have prevented a reproductive rights movement from really taking hold,” Newitz says.In the novel, time travel has gone mainstream. Anyone with the proper training can do it, although technically it’s only supposed to be used for research. That doesn’t stop Tess, under the guise of studying cultural history, from trying to “edit” the timeline to thwart men’s rights activists from trying to subjugate women through their own illicit edits.And hidden within Tess’s agenda is another secret, which she hides even from her trusted friends. That secret is revealed slowly to the reader, through