Writer Annalee Newitz on the Perils of Historical Amnesia

The author of the new novel ‘The Future of Another Timeline’ talks to OneZero about what it means to write (and rewrite) history

In Annalee Newitz’s new novel, The Future of Another Timeline, a time-traveling band of feminist academics battle against a group of men’s rights activists to see who will determine the course of history. As each group takes steps to alter the past, they leave their imprint on the future, determining whether abortion will be legal and whether women will have the right to vote or be reduced to little more than the property of men.

OneZero sat down with Newitz to chat about real-life attempts to edit the timeline, the forgotten history of feminist activism, and why understanding the past is the key to unlocking our futures.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

OneZero: I wanted to start out with a quote from Anthony Levandowski, a self-driving car engineer. “I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess — the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter.” I’d love to hear your reaction to that quote.

Annalee Newitz: This is part of the problem we’re facing, not just in the tech industry, but in the United States—the idea that we can ignore history and all the problems that have been left over from history, such as the results of slavery, redlining, and Jim Crow laws, which have profoundly divided our population and created a permanent lower-class status for people of color.

These things are all affecting us today. They’re affecting us socially and politically. And if we don’t understand where they came from, we’re never going to be able to move on and actually progress. Academics call it historical amnesia. It’s this idea that we’re special and unique and nothing we do now has anything to do with the past, and we’re going to reinvent the…