Time's Agent
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
"All at once a meditation on motherhood, grief, war, environmental collapse, dread, and the nature of memory and time. I ate it up."—Lauren Groff, New York Times bestselling author
A multiverse story of love, loss, time travel, and final-stage capitalism from award-winning author Brenda Peynado.
Pocket World—a geographically small, hidden offshoot of our own reality, sped up or slowed down by time.
Following humanity’s discovery of pocket worlds, teams of academics embarked on groundbreaking exploratory missions, eager to study this new technology and harness the potential of a seemingly limitless horizon.
“What would you do, given another universe, a do-over?”
Archeologist Raquel and her wife, Marlena, once dreamed the pocket worlds held the key to solving the universe’s mysteries. But forty years later, pocket worlds are now controlled by corporations squeezing every penny out of all colonizable space and time, Raquel herself is in disgrace, and Marlena lives in her own pocket universe (that Raquel wears around her neck) and refuses to speak to her.
Standing in the ruins of her dream and her failed ideals, Raquel seizes one last chance to redeem herself and confront what it means to save something—or someone—from time.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An angst-ridden archaeologist tries to save her marriage in this sprawling cli-fi adventure from Peynado (Rock Eaters). Raquel Petra is an agent with the Global Institute for the Scientific and Humanistic Study of Pocket Worlds, or PWs. These alternate universes are often just a few kilometers wide, only accessible via hidden "doorpoints," and offer scientists a chance to study flora and fauna that have been wiped out on Earth. PWs have also attracted the attention of developers who see their potential as sites for affordable housing, cash crops, and even landfills. When Petra accidentally falls through a portal, she finds herself 40 years in the future. Her wife, biologist Marlena, is missing; their daughter, Atalanta, is dead; and corporations now control the PWs and hire agents to do their unethical bidding. Petra's search for Marlena takes her through PWs both strange and familiar—including the one where she and Marlena camped out on their first job together, which was once an ocean paradise but is now a near-airless trash heap. Peynado loosely sets the story in the Dominican Republic and makes ample use of Taino history for her worldbuilding. Despite those details, readers will have a tough time charting Petra's internal state and the shifting stakes of her mission as she darts between worlds. Though action-packed and well-imagined, this quest lacks a clear sense of purpose.
