When you read a lot of science fiction, you spend time in a lot of unpleasant futures: natural disasters, human disasters, alien invasions, pandemics, all of the above at once. But rarely has a hot mess of a future felt as devastatingly intimate as the one in Brenda Peynado’s novella Time’s Agent. Her believable, recognizable future is smothered under centuries of grief, colonization, and capitalist greed—with more yet to come.
Raquel Petra is an agent for the Institute, which investigates pocket worlds, or PWs. (Technically, it’s the Global Institute for the Scientific and Humanistic Study of Pocket Worlds, a big name with big ideals.) These worlds, which are discovered sometime not too far in our future, have been hidden on Earth for ages—long enough that archaeologist Raquel dreams of finding a Taino civilization in one. Along with her biologist wife, Marlena, and a team of genius scientists, Raquel goes into PWs to see what there is to see: what can be saved, what’s been destroyed, what escaped from our side of each doorpoint and what has never crossed over. It’s heady, incredible work, finding new (to us) species and experiencing the warped way time passes in the PWs.
In some pocket worlds, a single minute might mean that when an agent returns, a year has passed on Earth. Generally, drones help the agents avoid major time mishaps, but when Raquel accidentally follows a kid into a newly discovered PW, she loses forty years in the blink of an eye. Marlena was in the opposite kind of world—where time passes slowly—and tucked for safekeeping around Raquel’s neck, so they’re technically together. But when Marlena discovers what’s happened in those lost years, she retreats to her lush jungle world, isolated and grieving.
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Time’s Agent
Time’s Agent begins in Raquel’s present, on her 38th birthday; loops back to a very good day in the past; comes back to her present; and circles again to explain her brief and disastrous trip into the fateful PW. It is disorienting on purpose; reading the story like this leaves a reader feeling an echo of Raquel’s out-of-time-ness, her loss and confusion and fury. Marlena won’t come out, and the other member of Raquel’s family, their daughter Atalanta, is both gone and not. She died in the War of the Trees, soon after her mothers disappeared, but her consciousness—or some replica of it—exists in the form of a scan Raquel took on the last night their life was normal.
For its relatively short length, Time’s Agent is a lot of book. The perspective stays close to Raquel, who struggles, and grieves, and doesn’t know what to do with herself, all her purposes destroyed in the years she’s lost. People from her past appear in the future, but they have changed and she, to all appearances, has not. Her job barely exists: Forty years on, the Institute has lost its standing, and corporations control the pocket worlds, monetizing them, destroying them, using them up.
It’s a grotesque and believable extension of how we live now. Peynado doesn’t flinch as she imagines ever more inventive and horrifying uses for these little bubbles of time: Beauty treatments, Tiny Transports, too-small sleeping quarters, tourist traps, literal garbage dumps. If there is something humanity wants—to stay young, to make money, to pretend we don’t create mountains of trash on a daily basis—some opportunist has found a way to use a pocket world for it. People sell themselves into worlds where they work for years, only to come home exhausted and worn out mere moments later.
The grief in this book isn’t contained to the emotions of its characters; it’s mourning our world and what we’ve made of it. Penyado draws clear lines between the past and future, illustrating the way things do and don’t change, the way history informs a present full of poverty and inequality, the way these patterns might repeat even across worlds if they continue unchecked. The dream of the pocket-world explorers—who are also a kind of colonizer, a truth Peynado doesn’t flinch from—is “Universe Two.” A do-over. A clean slate. When a desperate Raquel hears about a new PW, one that might offer what she’s been looking for, she sets off in a race against time and corporations, hoping to find what she needs or, at the very least, do what she can to keep the same thing from happening to another universe.
There are moments, in the final scenes of this novella, where I wished it were a novel; I wanted to slow down, to have more time to take in the repercussions, the choices, the worlds. But it might be too much if there were more. The emotional weight of Raquel and Marlena’s loss, the questions of their future, and the way Peynado links these women’s lives to their history and future—it’s elegant, it’s a gut-punch, and it never feels like a lecture. It feels like an acknowledgement: This is what has been, this is what is, and this is where we might be headed if we don’t learn to change and let go. And if we can’t, the grief will be shattering.
Time’s Agent is available from Tordotcom Publishing.
