Be it the Marvel movies, Rick & Morty, or Star Trek, a lot of recent stories involving the multiverse have people visiting different versions of their world, complete with variants of their friends and coworkers.
But in Brenda Peynado’s new novella Time’s Agent (paperback, Kindle), she takes a different approach by having this science fiction story be about pocket universes.
In the following email interview, Peynado discusses what inspired and influenced this sci-fi story.
Photo Credit: Micah Dean Hicks
To start, what is Time’s Agent about, and when and where is it set?
Time’s Agent is a multiverse story of love, loss, time travel, and robots that’s set in the Dominican Republic. It asks the question: “What would you do, given another universe? A do-over?”
Following humanity’s discovery of pocket worlds (small offshoots of our own reality, sped up or slowed down by time), teams of academics embarked on groundbreaking exploratory missions, eager to study this new technology and harness the potential of a seemingly limitless horizon. Archeologist Raquel and her wife, Marlena, once dreamed that 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, her daughter has died and her consciousness resurrected in a robot dog’s body, 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.
Where did you get the idea for Time’s Agent?
This started as a short story about a woman whose daughter has died and she’s tried to resurrect her consciousness in a robot dog. As part of her grief, she wants to give her daughter’s consciousness, this robot dog, a perfect day. Except that the world is not this perfect place, it never was, and every day something happens that makes her reset her daughter and hope that the next day will be the beautiful day she promised her daughter the night before she died. Every day is her coming to terms with this failure.
At the time, I was thinking very much about whether or not I wanted to have kids, and this and other stores ended up being a meditation on what it meant to bring a child into this world, as flawed as it is.
Of course, the story spiraled out from there the more I wrote. How can you write about lost innocence, the grief over losing a child, without also acknowledging, grieving, this broken world you would have kept them in? So the story became a meditation on the brokenness of the world around me.
And once you start grieving over the state of the world you would have handed this innocent child, you start to wonder how selfish you are in wanting to keep them there. So then it became a meditation on the self, what we want, human greed, our ability to look away from others in order to try to fully live ourselves.
I finished the book when I was just a few months after giving birth to my daughter during the pandemic. I wanted to imagine hope. I had to write my way into hope, even with my character newly aware of her own complicity in all that mess.
And is there a reason why you made this about pocket worlds as opposed to the multiverse or just different planets in our reality?
It was set in the Dominican Republic from the beginning. That pursuit of the perfect day, a lost time of innocence, was something I felt deeply when I lived in the Dominican Republic in my twenties, trying to recapture the feeling of my childhood summers when my family would return from the U.S. to be surrounded by cousins and sunlight, the sea. But of course, the lost motherland is a myth that I could not recapture. So I felt very keenly Raquel’s plight, trying to recapture a lost time, and for me the soundtrack to this crescendos with the sea waves collapsing on the sand and barricades of the Malecón.
Once I introduced time displacement, the possibility of do-overs and worlds free of our former mistakes, that invited all sorts of questions and tests for the narrator. What would she do in this world, or this one, or this one? What would she give her child from this one or this one or this one?
I love multiverse stories, but my only complaint about them is that having a separate version of yourself who made other choices, who you can even battle, allows the main character to displace themselves from the worst of their possibilities. Yes, our other multi-verse selves are us, but they’re also not us. We can reject them, battle them, seal off those other worlds. But what if, even when we discover new universes, new hope and possibility, the only people waiting for us there are ourselves, the selves we entered with and cannot escape? And if there are other people there, they can reject us, seal us away as if weare complicit in the villainy? In this story, I was interested in Raquel’s complicity, how she was the seed of her own destruction, these other worlds being only mirrors, fast-forwarded or in slow-motion.
It sounds like Time’s Agent is a science fiction story, but it also sounds like it might be romantic.
It’s a romance only in that it’s a story of redemption, the way we are indebted by love to other people and the world. Raquel’s wife is a part of it, but so is her daughter, and her redemption is so much larger than that. She bears the weight of whole worlds on her shoulders, and this is mainly a story about what she does with that responsibility. When Raquel gets the opportunity to open a new door to a new world that promises to fix everything, does she open it? Yes, there is a kiss that figures heavily into the beginning, and a touch-filled reconciliation scene at the end. That’s about as heavy as it gets, though I’m not going to lie, I would one day like to write a heavy romance.
Time’s Agent is your first novella, though you’ve written some short stories, which are collected in a book called The Rock Eaters. Are there any writers, or specific stories, that had a big influence on Time’s Agent, but not on anything else you’ve written?
I feel like my influences are a giant mush in my brain, and since I wrote this book while I was also finishing stories and working on another novel set in the Dominican Republic, I can’t say that I have any influences that wouldn’t appear in my other work.
Kelly Link, one of my literary heroes, is always an influence on my work, though one story in particular sparked my thinking about pocket worlds. Her story, “Light” [available in her collection Get In Trouble], in which a narrator has a shadow twin who lives in a pocket universe and people keep mysteriously falling asleep, definitely inspired me to think about the multiverse as something a lot tinier and segmented than we normally imagine, and then I started wondering, what if tiny little worlds were also offset by time and you could manipulate time that way?
I also adore How To Lose The Time War [by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone], and I was so impressed by how quickly that novella moved and how short and deep its chapters were, so I definitely think the quick way this novella moves in short chapters and how Raquel dips into worlds and then emerges from them is an homage to that novella.
How about such non-literary influences as movies, TV shows, or games? Did any of those things have a big influence on Time’s Agent?
During the pandemic, while pregnant, I spent quite a lot of time on my Oculus Quest. The Under Presents is a super-surreal multiverse game that I got lost in. It’s just brilliant. It also has tiny worlds mixed with time-loops, and its surreal horror of going back to beginning over and over and nothing quite making sense is something I wanted to bring to Time’s Agent. My book is a lot more straightforward than that game, but I’d like to think that the reading experience feels like that game play.
Now, Time’s Agent sounds like a stand-alone story. But since you never know, I’ll ask: Is it?
Yes, it’s a stand-alone book. The ending gives closure for Raquel, even while some of it is open-ended, especially for the other characters who go on without her.
However, I have considered writing more books in this world that will follow some of the secondary characters, some of the people lost to time or sent into other universes. “Time’s Soldier” might be the next one I return to, after I finish the novel I’m currently working on about the 1965 civil war and American invasion in the Dominican Republic.
I asked earlier if Time’s Agent was influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games. But to flip things around, do you think Time’s Agent could work as a movie, show, or game?
I would be over the moon if someone decided to make Time’s Agent into a TV show. I think it would work best as a TV show because of all the secondary characters, how many worlds and times she could dance in and out of, how much plot there is. Something like Quantum Leap crossed with Altered Carbon.
And if someone wanted to make that show, who would you want them to cast as Raquel and Marlena, and the other characters?
[Avatar‘s] Zoe Saldana as Raquel (is that cliché? I love her) and Sonalii Castillo [The Outpost] or Sharon Pierre-Louis [Switched At Birth] as Marlena.
Also, I would die if Omahrya Mota [X-Men: Last Stand] would play a version of Delatonio (the villain). Or if Mota played Raquel and Saldana played a version of Delatonio.
What if someone wanted to make Time’s Agent into a game…?
Nobody should ever make this, but if Time’s Agent were ever a board game, it would be a version of Monopoly where each square was a pocket world, instead of going to jail, you would skip back and forward in time, and if you won, you have to look yourself in the mirror for hours and talk about your greatest hopes while you progressively got hungrier.
Finally, if someone enjoys Time’s Agent, what sci-fi novella that you read recently would you suggest they check out?
Of course How To Lose The Time War is brilliant, time-bendy, the best queer spy thriller, and with so much more romance than mine.
But I also just read Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, The Horizon, And The Chain. Every book I’ve read of hers drips with the most gorgeous sentences (she’s also a poet!), and the way she describes the chain connecting every human and the metaphysical mysticism of “the practice” brought me to tears. It has a very similar exploration of capitalism and exploitation hand-in-hand with world-exploring hope to Time’s Agent.
