Time's Agent by Brenda Peynado

"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.

Time's Agent is like a worst of all possible worlds capitalist multiverse. Literally. All the pocket worlds taken over by corporations, human life treated as completely disposable. Strings upon strings of tragedies, catastrophies, extinctions, until there are so many you become numb. The protagonist's (who was a pocket world archeologist investigating Taino ruins) daughter is both dead and alive, her wife (pocket world naturalist) won't talk to her and stays in a pocket dimension she wears around her neck, and the accident which caused all this is what loosed the nightmare dystopia on the world. This is not one of those time travel stories where you can just go back and make things right. There is no reset for Earth Standard. Earth Standard is screwed. But there might be hope in another way.

Set in the Dominican Republic, ties deep into Taino religion and myth, and is a lesbian tragedy where the lesbians don't die. Still a tragedy. Really, the Earth in Time's Agent makes me feel like, okay, at least our world could never become that bad, what we get will be only marginal terrible compared with that.

Some of the ending confused me because I don't have the cultural context, and i didn't really care for the way the authors used abbreviations for certain things. But it left me feeling a husk, some hopeful, and that is feeling something other than numb. Maybe feeling numb was the point. But I don't want to feel numb at everything terrible in the world.