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.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Thank you NetGalley and Tordotcom Publishing for this advanced copy.

Let me start by saying that science fiction is not my most read genre. Most of the time I don’t really understand what is going on, but I try really hard … I do. Haha! I will say that while I don’t fully grasp what happened here (I handle time jumping storylines much better visually on screen), I still enjoyed every word and moment of this one.

I loved the characters! I thought how they each handled their unique situations were both fair and understandable reactions. There was a section at the end that I had incorrectly assumed what would happen, and I’m not entirely sure if that made me happy or disappointed me. Again, probably because I don’t truly understand anything. lol

This is a super fast read coming in at 160 pages, but it packs a punch for a little thing! And isn’t the cover stunning?!

If you enjoy SciFi, dystopian, time-traveling, multiverse themes, then you’ll love this short story! I certainly did!

This was a hard one for me to rate. On one hand, I really was fascinated by the concept and idea for the world/plot. But, on the other hand, the execution of said idea was just not where it needed to be. The pacing was good, especially for such a short story. I just felt that we never really connected to the characters--it could have been their characterization, or maybe it was how short the story itself was (I think only around 160 pages!) but I just never fully got into it. The writing was good, though, and I would definitely check out more from this author in the future!

***Thank you to Tordotcom for providing a copy of the book via NetGalley. My review contains my honest thoughts about my reading experience.***

Time's Agent was such a fascinating novella that explored some heavy, thought-provoking themes. I'm always a bit leery of novellas because I never know if the author will manage to tell a rich and meaningful story with enough depth. The shorter format often leaves me wanting more, but not in a good way. This book managed to tell a great story that felt complete and satisfying on both the emotional and conceptual levels.

The premise of Time's Agent was probably my favorite thing about it. I loved the idea of the pocket universes with varying speeds of time compared to our own. It was just such a cool thing to explore. The setting of Santo Domingo was also really unique, and it was so fascinating to see what a dystopian future might look like there. It did take me a minute to get up to speed on the specifics of the setting and premise, though. I had some trouble settling into the first few chapters because the story just jumped right into things with lots of terms and details that I didn't understand. I was hooked enough to settle in for the ride, and I'm glad I did. Things made sense as the story went along. So, my trust in the storytelling was rewarded.

The main character in Time's Agent, Raquel, had my deepest sympathies. Through her struggles, the story explored the concept of grief in some gut-wrenching ways. She lost 40 years in the blink of an eye and came back to a completely different world. Her personal losses were staggering. I did feel for her, but I was a bit surprised how removed she seemed. The impact of her losses on her family were at the heart of the story. However, I never felt very attached to her or like I got to know her all that well. I think maybe a bit more balance between showing her life before and after the accident might have been helpful in making her feel even more relatable.

The world-building in Time's Agent was really cool. The commentary on colonization provided by integrating the story of the indigenous people into Raquel's story was very interesting. Pitting her career in archaeology against the very survival of those people provided some thought-provoking content and a great area of growth for Raquel. However, I wanted to know more about the natives, their history, and how they accomplished their amazing feats. It wasn't necessary to understand this story, but I still would've loved a bit more detail, especially since it might have given a bigger glimpse into why Raquel was so passionate about them.

The commentary on end-stage capitalism was another thing Time's Agent did very well. I'm not going to say much about it because it is definitely something to be experienced by reading this story. However, the imagery of the damaging nature of over-consumption was harrowing. I also liked how the story explored the ways that capitalism can corrupt scientific exploration and the search for knowledge. It warned that discoveries are not made in an ethically pure vacuum, which means that research must be conducted keeping in mind how others might use it for profit no matter how destructive.

Overall, Time's Agent was a heart-wrenching story of love and loss wrapped in thought-provoking speculative fiction. If a dystopian story about corporations using up multiple universes to the point of ruin for the sake of profit is something that sounds interesting, I definitely recommend picking up this novella. Therefore, I rate Time's Agent 4 out of 5 stars.

This book is a sci-fi with horror vibes that tells the story of pocket worlds and other dimensions. It explore dystopian futures and some interesting characters, with a feeling of dread and intrigue. I enjoyed the interesting ideas and the fast pacing. It isn’t my usual genre but I liked stepping out of my comfort zone.

The execution could have been a bit more to my own liking, to help me feel more connected to the characters but I enjoyed the book and found it different and creative.

This was a hard one to get into, honestly.
The premise was really interesting... pocket world dimensions are discovered that each run on slightly different timelines. The main character, Raquel, is a scientist who gets stuck in a pocket world and emerges 40 years later to find that the pocket worlds have been commoditized and corporations own and fought over them.
The ideas and messages were timely, but the pacing and character development wasn't my speed.
I think there are readers out there for this book. But I struggled to finish it.

A horror sci-fi that explores metaverses to contemplate grief, loss identity and capitalism.

The discovery of Pocket Worlds changes everything for science, nature and our understanding of time. These worlds are small slices of heaven, some no larger than a small island and populated with nature and artifacts. Our main character, archeologist Raquel and her wife, Marlena work for an institute dedicated to exploring and uncovering these worlds and who may have lived there previously. Perhaps even discover an entire second universe.

Everything changes when Raquel falls into a pocket world and 40 years in the real world passes in the blink of an eye. The story is dystopic bleak, as Raquel and Marlena come to terms with the death of their daughter in those 40 years, the change of culture, the destructive force of capitalism on discovery.

The pacing is quick, the chapters are short, the dread is real and all consuming. I'm glad this is a novella because this story is heavy with grief and loss.

This is my first Brenda Peynado book, but it won't be my last!

This book is best read by a window, hugging your daughter's stuffy, as food delivery drones fly by.

Raquel is an archeologist who, along with her botanist wife, studies pocket worlds. They are small bubbles of existence, sometimes as big as a large island, sometimes as small as a cardboard box. They are worlds with mermaids or dinosaurs, worlds where time goes faster or slower, worlds where humanity hasn’t yet left its mark. But Raquel, for all that she loves studying these places, finding traces of humanity in cave paintings, fossilized bones, tools, and burial sites, is looking for something else. She’s looking for the Taino, her ancestors, in the hopes that some of them might have escaped their fate at the hands of the Conquistadors, that somewhere, somehow, they’re still living.

This is both one of the most imaginative books I’ve read and one of the most depressing in equal measure. Did I like it? Yes, kind of? Because this book gives an unrelenting glimpse into an all too realistic depiction of humanity. If people did find worlds where mermaids existed, yes, we’d put them in fish tanks after either hunting them, or pollute their ocean until they died. What would we do with extinct birds and plants? Put them in zoos. Sell them for money. Exploit them and destroy them. Have a world where time goes slow? Plant crops that grow slowly while, in the real world, no time at all has passed.

The rich here have pocket worlds small enough to fit over their hands so that time stops and models, politicians, and socialites can have the hands of a twenty-year old while being decades older. The rich profit, the poor suffer, and world after world is despoiled and destroyed. It’s bleak and unrelenting and the world building is so good it hurts.

And yet. The ideas in this book are engaging and thought provoking. What happens to someone who vanishes for an hour, only to return to a world where decades have passed? What happens to a mother when she realizes the child she left behind …. is gone? What is it that makes us a person? Where do sentience and sapience overlap, and why — when all the world is falling apart around us — does humanity still hope, still think that, somehow, everything can and will get better? This is one of those books that I’ll be thinking of for some time after reading it; one of those books I’m not sure if I enjoyed reading, but I’m very glad I did read.

If you’re into speculative fiction, well written and honest and that takes a long, hard, and unforgiving look at where our hunger to consume and own will take us, this book is for you. If you enjoy meditations on the human condition, on how AI is progressing, how fast and how intelligent and how easy it is to blur the lines between what is and isn’t human, this book is for you. If you like character studies that involve grief, introspection, and pain that yields before a graceful and poignant cathartic ending … this book is for you.

The hell of it is, I’m not sure if this was the book for me. While I admire the author for their creativity and their skill in writing, I’m still digesting my own thoughts. Even so, it’s a five-star book that won’t be for everyone, and I really hope it finds it’s audience because it very much deserves to be read.

This book was a whole lot of fun. Quick little sci-fi, Novella that explores big topics and does it very well. We got to explore love, loss, grief, Complicated relationships, and late stage end capitalism.

Pocket and being able to enter alternate dimensions with different Time constraints was super interesting and unique. I really loved the way that you could enter these different worlds and accomplish amazing things that affected the standard time.

I thought our main character was very interesting and complex. She did not feel one dimensional. I felt very organically developed and fleshed out. Definitely related to her and her struggles. I loved how flawed she was, but also how realistic.

Rating: 3.5/5

"Time's Agent" by Brenda Peynado is a beautifully written novella that packs a powerful emotional punch within its 160 pages. The story explores themes of love, grief, and the difficult choices we face when confronted with the end of all things. Peynado masterfully weaves a world filled with pocket dimensions where time moves at different speeds, raising thought-provoking questions about what truly matters—making a mark on history or protecting what we hold dear.

The novella's strength lies in its world-building and the profound emotional resonance it evokes. The concept of pocket worlds, where time can be manipulated, is fascinating and adds a unique twist to the story. Peynado's prose is literary and poetic, making the novella feel like a pocket universe in itself—dense, rich, and full of depth.

However, despite the novella's many strengths, it may not be for everyone. The nonlinear narrative can be challenging to follow, and the heavy themes of loss and corporate greed might feel too close to reality. The characters, while well-drawn, can be difficult to connect with, which may detract from the overall experience for some.

For readers who enjoy speculative fiction with a literary flair and are willing to engage with complex themes, "Time's Agent" offers a rewarding, albeit bittersweet, journey. The novella's exploration of time, memory, and the human condition is both thought-provoking and heartbreaking, making it a memorable, if somewhat somber, read.

Overall, while "Time's Agent" might not resonate with everyone, it's a commendable work of speculative fiction that offers much to ponder long after the last page is turned.