This is a time travel novel for people who don’t like time travel novels, apparently. My wife, who is not a huge SFF fan and also really doesn’t like time travel books* somehow acquired this book from a friend. I read it while she listened to it, and she loved it.
The basic premise of this novel is pretty cool and unique to my experience; time machines have been on earth for millions of years, built into the rocky substrate at several locations around the globe. Built, left, or naturally formed is never fully explained; they don’t know in universe. The discovery of how they work must have taken experimentation across centuries but by the “present day,” a concept difficult to fully capture when characters in the book range in birth years from the 1800s to the 1970s to the 3300s, time travel is common, and possible. There are some rules set up to explain why not just everyone zips back to change history, and a big theme of the book is the difference between the “Great Man” and “Collective Action” theories as to why going back, say, to kill Hitler won’t work. If you kill a “Great Man” (one with undue influence on the timeline) then another will just take his place.
Of course, the biggest theme of the book is abortion rights, and a major plot thread is a group of women who have taken it upon themselves to make changes to the timeline to prevent the subjugation of women by men, enshrine women’s right to vote and access to abortion. The book was published in 2019, and the big step backwards for abortion rights in this country since that time takes away a bit of the punch of the work the women did in the course of the novel.
The story is told from about 4 or 5 POV characters, though 80-90% of the book is told from two characters: Tess, a traveler from the future (2022), and Beth, a high school aged girl (1992). We find out quite quickly that Tess is the future embodiment of Beth, and she has returned to alter her own timeline to prevent a death that she was somehow part of. Threaded throughout is the story of evil men, Comstockers, who are trying to build on the legacy of that 1880s self-appointed moral activist who did much to prevent the progress of women’s rights. The major times examined during the novel are the 1992-1993 period where Tess/Beth tries to alter her own timeline, the 1890s where a group of women try to prevent Comstock from rising to power, and the 2022 time period, where the main group of activist women are coordinating their own efforts. We also visit the Ordovician period, and a religious sect set up around 2 CE.
Some of the minor characters have recurring roles across the timelines, and I want to reread it to see if I can find additional instances. For example, one of the 2022 group of women turns out to be one of the profs that Beth has back in 1993, and several of the time traveling men reappear across these major events.
I like the fact that the attempts to change time down the centuries are focused on pivot points that are real from our history. But we also have travelers from the future who hint at additional pivot points yet to come. Unanticipated by this author, obviously the repeal of Roe V. Wade recently is a pivot point that makes me wish that time travel was real. I liked this authors style a lot and am interested in reading her other book that came out a few years ago, as well as one forthcoming soon.
*her biggest issue is when future people meet past versions of themselves, because how do you then not remember meeting yourself in your past. She points out the Star Trek reboot as an example, but I believe that that is explained in universe, because of a branching timeline. Future Spock doesn’t remember past Spock as he is from a different branch.