Here and Now and Then

 

Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen

This is an entertaining time travel book. Kin Stewart, an agent for the Time Corruption Bureau (TCB), an agency tasked with tracking down criminals attempting to use time-travel technology to alter history, is stranded in near-present day America, the chronological past for him. His tracker device destroyed, Stewart is stranded for 18 years and builds a life for himself, including getting married and having a child.

His brain unable to support memories from two different eras, he begins to forget his life in 2142 and has a series of headaches and blackouts that his family believes to untreated PTSD. Eventually Kin is found and forced to return to his home timeline. When he researches his family's history, he learns that his wife dies of cancer shortly after he leaves and his daughter spins off the rails, eventually killing two people in a drunk driving crash. The remainder of the book details Kin's mission to re-assimilate into his life in 2142, where only 2 weeks have passed, and then attempt to rescue his daughter from a life of hardship and regret.

Chen doesn't do much to describe the mechanics of time travel, but does lay out some interesting rules. Like many time travel stories, this one also seeks to restrict access and has a hard timeline. That is, there are a lot of concerns about grandfather paradoxes and keeping the reality of time travel hidden from the general public.

One thing that Chen accomplishes in this novel is heightening the drama and creating a sense of urgency. The narrative maintains a good momentum once it gets going, which can be a difficult thing to do in a time travel story. After all, if the traveler can go to any time, what is the urgency of going now when one can go and fix it later? Chen closes this loophole by building some administrative difficulties into time travel and also writes that time travel degrades the traveler's body so that a series of pre-and post-jump shots are needed. Kin's body is worn out from being out of its own time for so long and he loses a required shot.

In the end, Kin accomplishes his mission and regains his love for the woman he left behind in 2142. He is able to regain a connection with his daughter from the other timeline and avoid detection or paradoxes.

This is among a few recent time travel books that I have read and it does well. The rules are a little harder in this one and there is a little less room for rumination on the social effects of time travel, but it does contain some interesting elements, such as meditations on food production in our era versus and 2142, and a seeming-Dune-inspired spice with psychotropic properties from Mars. I hoped that Chen would use the spice as a jumping off point for observations about space travel and colonization, but he keeps his focus tight on Kin's quest, using the spice strategically in the narrative.