Time's Agent

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.