Time's Agent

Time's Agent

Brenda Peynado

#2403 of 8,085 books · #651 in Science Fiction

Won the Philip K. Dick Award (2025).

A multiverse story of love, loss, time travel, and final-stage capitalism from award-winning author Brenda Peynado. Pocket World—a geographically small, hidden offshoot of our own reality, sped up or slowed down by time. Following humanity's discovery of pocket worlds, teams of academics embarked on groundbreaking exploratory missions, eager to study this new technology and harness the potential of a seemingly limitless horizon. "What would you do, given another universe, a do-over?" Archeologist Raquel and her wife, Marlena, once dreamed the pocket worlds held the key to solving the universe's mysteries. But forty years later, pocket worlds are now controlled by corporations squeezing every penny out of all colonizable space and time, Raquel herself is in disgrace, and Marlena lives in her own pocket universe (that Raquel wears around her neck) and refuses to speak to her. Standing in the ruins of her dream and her failed ideals, Raquel seizes one last chance to redeem herself and confront what it means to save something—or someone—from time.