The feminist time-travel adventure follows Tess, a professional time traveler, geoscientist, and secretly a member of the Daughters of Harriet (Tubman), who are working to make the future better for women.

Tess travels backwards in time to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, where she and her cohort take on nineteenth-century moralist and anti-family-planning crusader Anthony Comstock, the inspiration for the futuristic cabal.

However, beyond any moral objections to this path, the philosophical consideration arises with the theory that ridding the world of one bad influencer might simply clear the way for another; that the social forces at play will continue in the same direction regardless of the player.

It is, on the one hand, a starkly feminist piece of contemporary science fiction about the dangers of accessible time travel, the lengths some people will go to in order to enforce their worldview and what it takes to resist.

[5] Kirkus Reviews calls Another Timeline "An ambitious adventure that keeps the surprises coming", noting the careful character development and the fast-paced plot, which is finally tied together with "breathtaking finesse".

[6] In his Chicago Tribune review, Gary K. Wolfe finds Newitz's rules of time travel unnecessarily complex, but writes that "Newitz more than makes up for it with [their] vivid portrait of the raucous South Side of Chicago during the World’s Fair — incidentally revealing the little-known important roles that women played in that spectacle — and especially with [their] portrait of the young punk-wannabe Beth trying to negotiate her way through a troubled adolescence in the 1990s".

The Future of Another Timeline might be the most political novel in a year that drops a Handmaid’s Tale sequel The Testaments, but it certainly disproves that issue-based science fiction needs to be less fun than supposedly 'apolitical' adventures.

While there’s plenty of light, fast-moving action here, the story also has a pulsing, claustrophobic, dystopian heart... Newitz’s Comstockers are far too real and present to be mere satire.

Newitz blends exquisitely rendered historical research with a complex science fiction, the time-travel premise whose internal logic is well-thought-through, throwing up all kind of hard puzzles for their characters to solve...