A lot of the words that came up large on my cloud were fairly predictable, but there were some that surprised me. For instance, “love.” I can attribute it to my brief obsession with the short story “If you were a dinosaur, my love,” but my trends chart indicates that while that was when the appearance of the word “love” spiked, it’s also appeared fairly consistently throughout the documents I looked at. This brings me to another one of my special interests while doing this search – science fiction with LGBT+ themes. A lot of the spikes in “love” coincide with the word “queer.” The prominence of words like “story,” “stories,” and “book” indicates that I prefer print media and is also indicative of the way that I searched for these sites: mainly by googling my favorite sf authors and reading articles about them.

A few more trends of interest:
– A few specific phrases from my favorite stories made it onto the infographic: like Breq and Radchaai from Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series, and Yuan, one of the characters in Ken Liu’s short story “Seventh Day of the Seventh Moon.”
– If someone asked me what my primary interests in sf were, I would probably say women, cities, theater, and LGBT+ themes, and I was little disappointed at how small some of those terms were.

I love it when books put a fresh face on sf tropes, like time travel in this case.  The Future of Another Timeline is a novel by Annalee Newitz about a woman who works with a group called The Daughters of Harriet to edit the timeline and promote the rights of women and non-binary people.

There were a few things that I thought were super interesting in this book’s take on time travel.  First of all, time travel is an ancient part of earth that has been there since the beginning.  This means that all the characters, no matter how mundane, know that time travel is possible, happening around them, and they don’t think too much of it.  The longevity of time travel also makes it possible for different cultures to have different theories, uses for, and beliefs about time travel.

This brings me to my favorite part of this book.  Throughout the story, the Daughters of Harriet their attempts to change the timeline by traveling back in time to their period of expertise, and creating small “edits” through collective action and organizing with other women.  Many people in this world believe in the “Great Man” theory, which posits that it’s useless to go back in time and kill Hitler, as has been done many times, because another man will inevitably take his place in the historical narrative.  Because of this theory, the consensus is that because these so-called great men are easily replaceable, it’s impossible to make major edits to the timeline.

This book makes the powerful argument that editing the timeline is possible, but only through collective action.  The “Great Man” theory assumes that only powerful, usually white, men can drive important changes in history, but the Daughters of Harriet prove that organizing collective action makes changing the timeline possible.

The themes of this story reminded my a lot of Octavia Butler’s Earthseed books, especially Parable of the Sower, another book that I love.  The “great man” in the Earthseed books (the president who is uncannily similar to Donald Trump) may have been easily replaced by another demagogue, but Lauren Oya Olamina’s community eventually change’s the timeline more powerfully than he ever did.

In both of these books, women and non-binary authors imagine futures (and pasts) where collective action and community can thrive while undermining powerful men.  I’m still ruminating on this – maybe a topic for my manifesto?

This is a phrase that (I believe) was coined by theater critic Elisabeth Vincentelli to describe shows with lots of fun sing and dance numbers where everyone in the audience has a great time and you aren’t really prompted to think analytically or learn something new from the plot.  I think that this phrase also describes a lot of sf that I enjoy.  Sometimes you don’t need good characterization, ornate writing, or science that makes any sense at all to enjoy a story, and my most recent experience with this was reading Dark Matter by Blake Crouch.

I read the book during a happier time: in one sitting at my library shift the last Friday before spring break.  As I was reading, I was unamused by characters with very few personallity traits, poorly explained technology, and the shortest sentences you could possibly imagine.  But I couldn’t help myself.  The scenario of a man travelling through parallel universes at breakneck speed in order to return to his real life was compelling and so much fun to read about.  I guess this proves that for me, a book doesn’t need to do everything right, it just needs to do one thing well, and I’ll stick with it until the end.  If anyone is looking for a book to get completely absorbed in for an afternoon, Dark Matter is definitely the way to go.  And thank you to Cole for recommending I read this!