Ferris Mx’s Reviews > The Ministry of Time > Status Update

Most friendship quartets don't function in squares but in lines.

You can't trauma-proof life, and you can't hurt-proof your relationships. You have to accept you will cause harm to yourself and others. But you can also fuck up, really badly, and not learn anything from it except that you fucked up. It's the same with oppression. You don't gain any special knowledge from being marginalized. But you do gain something from stepping outside your hurt and examining your oppression.

I didn't understand that my value system was a system, rather than a point on a line that represented *progress". My drugs were cleaner, my goods were abundant, my rights were enshrined. Was this not *progress*? I struggled with the same bafflement over *history*, which I still understood in rigid, narratively linear terms. I should have listened more carefully to Adela about history. I know Adela would say the same.

"If the expats survive, are we going to experiment with using time-travel to change history?"
"You misunderstand how history works," Adela said. "History is not a series of causes and effects which may be changed like switching trains on a track. It is a narrative agreement about what has happened and what is happening."