Everywhere you go, there are places that feel like they would lead to another world. For me, it was one hallway in the middle school I went to that had a sign that said it was off-limits for students (I eventually found an excuse to go down it, and it ended up on the upper level of seats for the school’s rather large auditorium - prosaic, sure, but nothing makes a teenager want to do something more than being told not to do that thing). For many of us, these are backrooms, gas stations, airports, and places that you expect simply to pass through, never lingering there. It is this human impulse that Brenda Peynado stretches out in her novella Time’s Agent, published in 2024 by Tor.com.
Time’s Agent is set in a near-future Dominican Republic, where capitalism lumbers ever longer into the future, teetering on the edge of collapse but never actually giving anybody the satisfaction thereof. In this future, humanity has figured out how to access ‘pocket universes,’ other planes of existence that have different sizes and different rates of the passage of time. Since it is the nature of capitalism to enclose the commons, as was done to common lands in Europe in the early modern period, the forces of capitalism march inexorably into these pocket universes and use them to suck ever more value from not only the pocket universes, but from the people who are sent to them.
Peynado spends a lot of time showing just how these pocket universes are exploited. A common thing for the poor to do is to do backbreaking agricultural labor in a pocket universe in which time flows much more slowly than in our world; they enter the pocket in their twenties and come out in their sixties when only a few days have passed in our world. But it bears mentioning that the benefits of pockets are not only for the wealthy, as others have become wealthy by selling pockets to the poor; some parents use the pockets as cribs to put their children in while they work, while students at university use them to study for exams while saving time in the present.
A small thing that Peynado does that I liked is the distinction between how time passes in the main world versus time as experienced by a person in a pocket dimension, such as the farm workers mentioned in the previous paragraph. The very concept of different time streams accessible to a society can wreak chaos on how we usually reckon somebody’s age. I kept making mental comparisons to Isaac Asimov’s 1955 novel The End of Eternity, where time travelers have to keep up with what Asimov calls ‘physiotime,’ a straightforwardly useful concept I am surprised more writers haven’t made off with. I have no idea if Peynado had taken a page from Asimov (the concept strikes me as obvious enough for someone to derive independently; indeed it was something I had thought about before I read the Asimov novel) but, being the massive nerd I am, I noticed the similarity.
And as with all new discovery and all new invention, the powers that be will use them in one way, and the downtrodden and marginalized will find their own uses. Such are your main characters: a lesbian couple, one of whom is of Haitian heritage (and Haitians in the Dominican Republic are very much a marginalized group in that country). They are both scientists who, in the early days of the exploration of pocket universes, belong to a scientific institute whose investigations of the new phenomena are humane, even humanistic. They are rudely thrown out of the institute when it is commandeered by the sort of vulture capitalist that destroys anything good in the world, and through shenanigans related to pocket dimensions, find themselves hurled decades into the future, where the enclosure of the pocket commons is complete.
There’s a heavy through-line of loss in this novella. The two main characters had a daughter, but they lose her, and one of them tries to ‘resurrect’ her in a hamhanded way that bears the hallmark of someone stuck in the bargaining stage of grief (while at first the particular method of ‘resurrection’ felt like a digression, the more I thought about it the more it fit into the book’s thematic core). More broadly, that same character has a fascination with the Taíno people, the indigenous people of the island of Hispaniola (which is shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic), whom she suspects of having found a way to use pocket universes to their own uses.
In giving the Taíno access to the pockets, Peynado takes an old orientalist trope and flips it on its head. Many works of white-written science fiction and fantasy give any number of ancient civilizations, often those in Africa or Asia or the Americas (rarely Europe, but occasionally so, such as the ancient Greek nuclear-powered mecha of the First Occult War in many SCP articles). In those works, this trope has unpleasant undertones, often with the sneaking suspicion that the white authors saw these cultures as inherently ‘mysterious’ and as such gave them license to just make things out of whole cloth. Sometimes, it ends up unintentionally justifying historical atrocities, such as in Wolfenstein: the New Order. Not so here; Peynado uses this trope in a very sensitive way, one that makes the Taíno come off as the reasonable, sensible people who don’t feel the need to obscure things with systems of thought justifying colonialism. The way it ultimately plays out is something I found to be very clever.
Time’s Agent is a very efficient book. I am very impressed with how many ideas could be packed into two hundred pages and change, while still having fully-fleshed out characters and a gripping, often heart-rending plot. This book manages to be the synthesis resolving the thesis of those old idea-heavy fifties science fiction (with modern descendants) and the antithesis of the more character-heavy SFF novel. Peynado shows she can do both things very well, and I feel that she is an author whose future efforts will be worth paying attention to.
Reference: Brenda Peynado, Time's Agent, [Tor.com, 2024]
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
