Cronus
P. Djèlí Clark
Using time-travel to change the world
In P. Djèlí Clark's Cronus, Annabeth is a black woman in 2030 Baltimore. I mention her race, because it is relevant. She has to sit in the back of the bus, and give up her seat if a white woman needs it. Annie's Baltimore is the Jim Crow south with twenty-first century mobile phones and artificial intelligence.
And time travel. Time-travel, of course. Annie works for Cronus, the big time-travel corporation, which has become inextricably entangled with the US government. Wealthy tourists come to Cronus in order to visit the past, where they can see black people killed in race riots of past centuries. The story opens with Annie helping a wealthy white man through the paperwork for a visit to Tulsa in 1921.
Annie has a younger brother. He is not really her biological brother, but both Annie and John Henry acknowledge the relationship. John Henry is institutionalized. He suffers from FMP -- False Memory Psychosis. He remembers things that never happened, such as a Black President named Barack Obama, and a Supreme Court decision that declared school segregation by race unconstitutional. [spoiler1]
This is a pretty good story. I have to warn non-USian readers, though, that it is intimately concerned with the USA's hang-ups and history about race. As a US citizen, I am familiar with and interested in our dirty laundry, so that was fine with me.
My main problem with the story, though, was world-building. The existence of FMP implies that the story’s altered history doesn't fully stick [spoiler2]. The stories in the Time Traveler's Passport are supposed to be read in a single sitting. They have to be short, which means a certain sketchiness in world-building is inevitable. Thus, I ought to excuse it. But it still bothered me. That's a "me" problem, perhaps.
It transpires that Cronus and the government have been using time-travel to manipulate the past in such a way as to preserve a nation in which the racial power structures of the early twentieth century have been preserved. Annie, of course, gets recruited into a revolutionary organization, the Combahee River Army, to do something about that.
and that the Combahee River Army’s attempts to fix it are likely to run into technical difficulties.