Time’s Agent

＂All at once a meditation on motherhood, grief, war, environmental collapse, dread, and the nature of memory and time. I ate it up.＂--Lauren Groff, New York Times bestselling author

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.

Brenda Peynado’s genre-bending short story collection, The Rock Eaters--featuring alien arrivals, angels falling from rooftops, virtual reality, and sorrows manifesting as tumorous stones--was named one of NPR, the New York Public Library, and Electric Literature’s best books of the year. Her stories have won an O. Henry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, and inclusion in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy.She teaches creative writing at the University of Houston.