Interestingly enough, my mind felt a similar conflict while reading Chen’s book. There is the constant wondering of what happened to his wife and daughter, as well as the worry that he is not being fair to the people currently in his life. Kin tries to settle back in a time that belongs to him, but he finds his mind pulled in two directions. Except, apparently, being in a mad, passionate love. “How easy it was for humans to fall back into their patterns, wherever or whenever they were.

We need people we need relationships we need love. This is something the reader would understand though, since the expectation of isolation and simply waiting it out doesn’t seem very practical. There is a certain irony at play here, since as a TCB agent he is meant to preserve the cleanliness of the timeline, but his actions of setting down roots and creating a life in a time that is not his speaks to immense complication. His body might belong to a future where his wife and daughter do not exist, but his heart cannot bring himself to leave them. While Kin is aware that he cannot continue to stay, there is much resistance in getting him back to where he belongs. But help doesn’t arrive, not for 18 years, and the agent who returns for him finds a man happily settled, with a wife and daughter. A fight with a time mercenary has left him injured and stranded with no way to get back home unless help arrives. The novel revolves around Kin Stewart, a TCB (Temporal Corruption Bureau) agent who at the beginning finds himself displaced in a time period that is not his. It is hard to envision a future with no proper fried food, though this speaks more about my bias towards fried chicken rather than a critique of Chen’s world-building.

However, I am not too sure I buy into the erasure of fast food.

Of course the first thing humans would do once we have the science and technology is figure out how to slow the progress of ageing. Chen’s conceptualization of the future is thoughtful and sensible. It explores a future where time travel is a reality and a job, and while at times we are a tad overloaded with exposition in the dialogue (Chen has to feed us the time travel rules and tidbits somehow), it doesn’t matter because he balances this with credible human relationships. Mike Chen’s debut novel thus fulfils all my reader expectations. I know it’s weirdly dictative on my part to say that, but I just cannot get immersed in the world unless it gives me something to connect my heart to. Science fiction needs to have heart to be good. But the gap between the quiet affection he felt and the deep adoration and love that should have been there stretched to an endless, impossible distance.

Mike chen here and now and then