Short and intriguing. Well-written and a compelling story, I’m definitely going to read more from Brenda Peynado.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Was an interesting short read. I like books I can devour in a few hours and this was enjoyable.. Loved the cover

My review was just published on line in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, March/April issue. Check out the Reference Library Column. It is available here:

https://www.analogsf.com/current-issue/the-reference-library/

- TIME’S AGENT is one of the bleakest books I’ve ever read, and I could not tear myself away.
- Peynado creates a world ravaged by climate change and capitalism, all turbocharged by the existence of pocket worlds that can be used up in service of corporate greed.
- Inside of that larger vision is the tender grief of Raquel and Marlena, mourning a life that was ripped from them in an instant.
- All of this is held within barely 200 pages. I really hope to see more work from Peynado in the future.

In Time’s Agent by Brenda Peynado (Tordotcom) humanity has discovered pocket worlds, tiny entry points into other worlds, sometimes a few kilometres square, other times barely large enough to fit a person. They hold beautiful opportunities to start over, find wondrous histories of small civilisations come and gone, discover and cultivate new flora and fauna, and to experience exploration like few in this modern era have done. It’s an opportunity for us to do better, but, we are humanity, and we are experts in ruining things.



Raquel and her wife Marlena work for The Institute, a scientific organisation on the bleeding edge of pocket world discovery. Pocket worlds run with time dilations, which can have some unintended consequences on time agent’s lives. When Raquel tries to help a woman who has just lost her son to a pocket world point, she breaks the rules and in a moment finds herself thrown forward in time from the excitement of her career and the rush of discovery, to a world where corporations have taken over from The Institute, commercialised pocket worlds, and her daughter has been killed in the ensuring war Raquel accidentally kicked off.

Time’s Agent is a novella I could not put down. The writing is just gorgeous throughout, delivering a story so layered in deep themes that I actually feel like I’ve imbibed a full-sized novel. Throughout this book, we delve into corporate greed, societal blind-spots, motherhood and loss, the impact of modern society on the spirituality of our history, time travel, relationships, and so much more. This is a novella for the awards lists, if I’ve ever read one. Peynado’s voice is on point, driving feelings of the weary excitement of discovery early on, and then going deep into the soul-crushing depression of late-stage capitalism, of a society eating itself alive for a dollar, that I would consider up there with T.R. Napper‘s cyberpunk voice.

What brings Time’s Agent truly to life, however, is not just the pocket worlds, or society’s decline–it’s the story of how Raquel and Marlena deal with the loss of their daughter. I really enjoyed the central story of what they had to go through to get what they wanted, and the way two people deal with what’s happened. I loved the message in there about understanding what you have, versus always striving for what you think you’re missing–something I think is quite poignant in our modern social-media driven society.

Time’s Agent by Brenda Peynado is warning shot to our modern species. It’s a lens into humanity’s ability to destroy the naturally beautiful for profit, to sequester that profit for the fortunate few while the rest slave to live, and a mirror to our society who collectively allow this to happen by participating, turning blind eyes, and only realising what we’ve done as a society once it’s too late to undo it. An absolutely harrowing must-read novella.

Sadly ,I've had to do a soft dnf for now and come back to the book in the future. I think the writing was very good. Based on what I've read so far I would still recommend this to people I know would love this type of story.

The intricacies and wordiness of the writing style combined with the triggers for grief in this story made it not right for me. I was entirely intrigued by the premise and the cover is beautiful.

I wish the pacing had been more consistent (lagged in parts and was dizzyingly quick by the end) and the characterization deeper, but I admire the originality and worldbuilding Brenda Peynado was able to accomplish. I'd enjoy learning more about pocket worlds, and I appreciate how she tied the work of the agents to the rise of corporate power and greed.

This book just didn’t connect with me as I’d had hoped it would. It’s more about the devastation left in the aftermath of a time agent’s poor decision rather than the life and adventure of a time agent. There was so much grief and despair filling this Earth of pocket universes that the story got lost although it was off to a good start.

Thanks to NetGalley and Tor Publishing for an ARC of this book.

Brenda Peynado (https://brendapeynado.com) is the author of two novels. Time’s Agent was published last August.

Opinions expressed here are unbiased and entirely my own!

Pocket worlds had been discovered. These are geographically small spaces with hidden entrances. Time runs differently in many. The Institute was created for academics to explore these pocket worlds, however after 40 years the corporations have taken over. The primary character is 38-year-old Raquel Petra, an archeologist with the institute.

I invested 1.5 hours trying to read this 208-page science fiction novel. After spending a little time with this novel I was not at all engaged in it. I called a Rule of 50 and gave up on it. I do like the chosen cover art.

This was a super enjoyable read! Time travel is often a tricky topic to handle in fiction, because sometime it can come across as a bit too complex or nonsensical to the average reader- yet I enjoyed this a lot. Even more surprising is how the book handled themes of capitalism and grief, which, I think, are all part of the human experience, and it's captured in this book really well.

Thank you to NG and the publisher!

My thanks to NetGalley for making an eARC of this book available for me.

Fascinating book about grief, time dilation effects, corporate greed, found family and archeology. Give it a try, I doubt you'll be disappointed.

"...time the thief is grabbing for it all with snatching hands."
As soon as I saw the cover I wanted to read this book, and then the premise turned my eyes into hearts and I couldn't resist this queer sci-fi with time travel and alternate worlds and a bonus! Robot dog companion that may or may not have the main character's daughter's memories. The way pocket worlds are described is so fascinating, I kept imagining that cat wearing the universe necklace in MIB and I'm pretty sure that's exactly how Raquel was wearing that PW that her wife was hiding in.
Throughout the whole book I got the interstellar+this is how you lose the time war vibes mixed with a little bit of A.I Artificial Intelligence and I loved everything about all of those things.
The way corporations are using the worlds is exactly how I think it would be in real life, it's so close to reality I wasn't actually thinking about that part as fiction.
"Once she told us that no humans were allowed to live there, only the animals, because they would never cut it down, and we grinned at the quaint things she would say."
Atalanta had my heart entirely, she was so sweet and I needed her mom's to have all the time in the world to spend with her, but we all know how the world is, ours or the parallel, doesn't matter, there's always something that gets in the way of being with the ines you love. The way she kept asking "What did you save today?" had me tearing up and every time I wanted to answer that question so that if she were asking me I would make her happy and proud too.
I got really attached to this story, probably because it has my favourite elements but mostly because it's short but full, the way I like my sci-fi books, it didn't leave me hungry for more, I had a sad and happy feeling at the same time and I would love to see this story adapted into a movie, I think it'll make a beautiful film.
"What would she see, if she looked hard enough? What would she realize about us? I turned her off, closed my eyes along with hers, both of us rebooting."
I only saved quotes today, but everyday I try to save someone, a cat, a dog, myself even, it's not easy saving someone, but it's not hard either. What did YOU save today?

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a free eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

There was a LOT packed into this little novella! It was really impressive how deep the worldbuilding felt and how much thought Peynado obviously put into the workings of the pocket worlds. This novella was simultaneously about a broken family and about incredibly big ideas like colonialism, grief, and inequality.

Loved this!

The characterization felt weak, despite the interesting premise! Unfortunately this wasn't a winner for me.

I'm going through my time-related melancholia phase, and this fits right in with The Other Valley and The Never Ending End of the World. I cried. It felt longer than a novella with the depth of worldbuilding. As an archaeologist, I felt like I understood Raquel - it's a job but also a paradigm through which we see the world, and Peynado captured that.

I'm wrung out after reading this, what an absolute stunner! Peynado has offered both hopeful and devastating possible futures, wrapped up in one tight package of grief. It's wild how much happens in this novella, and how much of it had me by the throat.

The premise is fascinating: the discovery of pocket worlds, different sizes and biomes and time dilations, accessed by doorways that humans have stumbled on accidentally for the entirety of our history on Earth. But these worlds, like any other discovery, are eventually at the mercy of human greed. It's a book about the violence of colonialism and capitalism, and the longing to undo those harms or find a way out from under them.

But these huge-scale themes are distilled through Raquel, an archaeologist in the Dominican Republic, part of an institution that studies pocket worlds, alongside her botanist wife Marlena. The action of this book—and there's a lot of it—is full of dazzling technology and hops in and out of pristine or utterly ecologically ruined dimensions, but the heart of it is with Raquel and the grief of her mistakes and the desperate hopes she tries to make real.

I barely even know what to say about this, even though I've now rambled for three paragraphs. It's breathtaking. It knocked my socks off. I have a sudden craving for mango.

An interesting, energizing piece of speculative fiction with the discovery of pockets of time (“pocket worlds”) that move differently from regular time, isolated from the rest of the world. Raquel is part of a government agency in the Dominican Republic tasked with documenting, analyzing and regulating these pocket worlds. This post-colonial attitude is very quickly echoed in Raquel’s hope to find Taino remnants in her research - the Taino people were very quickly and brutally exploited, abused and wiped out by Spanish conquistadors. As time carries forward without Raquel, she re-emerges into a world ever more bloated by capitalism and exploitation, her story shrouded with themes of grief and loss.

Raquel is at once obtuse and crystal clear around her motives, her actions, and their ramifications - a meta-narrative that flattens her character in areas. Her daughter-turned-robot-dog suffused the story with emotion, but other relationships felt just out of reach.

The science behind the fiction seemed well-researched, and explained Just Enough to follow without breaking immersion, and I think this could serve well as entry into the genre.

This novella was odd and alluring and I think, for me, not quite a great match. So let's start with the good--this world is fascinating. The way the science of the way pocket worlds function, and all the quirks of their magic, is rife for exactly the sort of tragedy and ruin this book needed to bring. Learning about the world alongside the main character lets you experience the same tragedy of understanding with her in a very satisfying way. I didn't mind the way the finer details of the science were glossed over, because I'm rarely in it for hard sci-fi anyway. I really enjoyed these parts of the novella, despite the sometimes soul-crushing despair.

However, I found myself rather disappointed in the characters and prose. All of the characters presented here were a little bit two dimensional and distant. We are given some handful of facts about them, but they never quite realize into a whole person. I think this is mostly the fault of a rather purple prose that made it hard to stick with the characters train of thought in their highest and lowest moments. Additionally, the themes/message itself had a similar flower-y nature to them, perhaps appropriate to the botanist love interest, but not quite connected with the brutality and tragedy of the world that I was most enjoying. The ending fell pretty flat, for me.

Despite my disappointments, I would still recommend this book to any one interesting in tragic, magic time travel. It reminds me quite a bit of the sort of twisted wish granting you'd find in The Magicians (Lev Grossman).

Time's Agent is such a unique take on universe travel! "Pocket Universes" did take a minute for me to wrap my head around, I'll admit. Eventually, I realized that they worked much like the time dilation in Season 7 of The 100, and that helped, which is pretty on brand for me. Raquel and her wife have come back to the "main" world after losing forty years during one misstep into a pocket world. That is crushing in itself, no? To top it off, they find out that their daughter died just weeks after their disappearance, so as you can imagine, things are bad. Also, really relatable for many, even if pocket world time problems are not at fault.

So to say that the characters were emotionally provocative is an understatement. And thing is, not only did they lose their daughter (as well as basically everyone else they knew and loved), the whole world was different, and not in a good way. Again, this is incredibly thought provoking- imagine if you'd left our world 40 years ago, and popped back in now. What would it look like? You'd feel... well, you get the idea.

It's an emotional story, an exciting story, and a really unique take on the concept. Sure, I was a wee bit confused at times, but nothing so overwhelming that I couldn't enjoy the book. While it is obviously a sci-fi concept, so many of the issues presented were relevant to all of us, in a very thought provoking way.

Bottom Line: It's like if you got stuck on Skyring for five years and everyone back at Sanctum didn't even notice you were gone, but in reverse. You're welcome.