Here and Now and Then (Mike Chen)

Here and Now and Then
Mike Chen
MIRA
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Time agent Kin Stewart thought the mission to the late 1990's would be routine, stopping yet another mercenary from meddling with causality for the financial gain of their employers in the twenty-second century. But everything goes wrong when his implanted device is damaged, leaving him without a way back home. Stranded and alone, Kin waits for rescue, the symptoms of his stranding slowly robbing him of his memories and health... until he stops waiting and starts building a modest life for himself.
Eighteen years later, Kin is a self-taught chef who works in internet security, happily married with a bright young teenage daughter, and who has almost convinced himself his memories of time travel are some manner of traumatic delusion or persistent dream - until the stranger appears in his back yard. The retrieval team has found him at last, and doesn't even give him 24 hours before whisking him back to his original time and a life he barely remembers... a life that includes friends and a fiancee, Penny, but not the wife Heather and daughter Miranda, whom he loves. Research tells him the fates of those he left behind - and tells him that his daughter Miranda in the twenty-first century needs him desperately, more than anyone on this side of the timestream. But her very existence is an anomaly, meaning a time agent could be sent to terminate her at any moment if she shows any signs of being a threat to their own temporal continuity. Worse, after his prolonged stay in the past, Kin's body has been pushed nearly beyond the breaking point, and any attempt to return to the past to warn her of the danger she's in may kill him... even assuming she believes the man who, from her point of view, vanished from her life without even saying goodbye. But what kind of father wouldn't risk everything - his career, his home, his very life - to save his daughter?

REVIEW: There's something to be said for a book that doesn't overthink or overanalyze itself, especially when it comes to the brain-breaking potential paradoxes of time travel. Here and Now and Then may feature a displaced time agent, but it's more about Kin's life facing upheaval and his loved ones in two centuries facing threats, in part simply because of him being who and what he is, than it is about the intricacies of time.
The reader meets Kin Stewart just as he loses his ticket back home and faces the consequences of being stranded in the past. Not only does time travel do a number on one's brain and body, but agents are trained to avoid interference and interaction as much as possible. Even standing in line for a cup of coffee may cause someone to be a minute late for an important meeting, causing a knock-on effect that could have a major impact on the timeline. Getting a job and marrying a local are clear steps over the line, let alone fathering a daughter, which happens when Kin still has enough memories of his time agent life to technically know better, for all that he considers himself a castaway with no hope of rescue. The arrival of a retrieval agent shatters the modest yet happy life he's built, not to mention the lives of his wife and teen daughter (neither of whom, of course, know anything about time travel) - made worse when Kin is drug away and back to his original timeline and finds himself facing the woman he was supposed to marry... a woman who knows nothing about time travel either (the agency operating under the strictest of secrecy), and doesn't understand how he's changed so much in only a few days (from her end of the timestream). Penny's introduction sets her up to be second fiddle in Kin's life, a distinctly less forceful and established personality than Heather or Miranda, and she stays that way for a little too long; it's as if the life-prolonging drugs of the future that see many people reach their second century (and allow them to put off childbearing until past their fifties) also prolongs their adolescent and young adult insecurities, as Penny comes across almost childlike at times, unable to decide on a future or stand up to her overbearing parents. One wonders what Kin saw in her, when his past wife Heather was so clearly well established in herself and her life. Even Kin seems to be having second thoughts, as he struggles to rediscover the love he must have felt for her, not helped by how he clings to a wife and daughter he was never supposed to have. Eventually, though, Penny comes around and grows up a little, round about the time the threat to Miranda's life in the past goes from a possibility to a certainty as the time agency targets her as a point of significant timeline deviation. As Kin breaks every time agent rule in the book to save Miranda from erasure, risking himself in the process, the women in his life are finally allowed to stand on their own and exhibit some agency and backbone... some of which was there all along, but overshadowed by Kin's role as Father and Protector, which unbalanced their interactions. Meanwhile, his one friend in the future tries to talk him out of breaking any more rules, even for the sake of love, before being forced to acknowledge that fatherhood bonds and obligations of the heart trump even the time agent rule book. (There's a definite Theme here about parenthood being the main worthwhile goal of any adult life, that those in the future are selfish and/or depriving themselves in some vital way by delaying or abstaining from the miracle of children.) The climax is more about Kin confronting the choices he's made and the lives he's affected and (albeit unintentionally) damaged than it is about facing down his employers or confronting rival agents, much as the story itself was more about Kin's struggle to reconcile two very different lifetimes.
I admit to wavering a bit on the rating. As I mentioned, sometimes it felt like the women were reduced to being about little more than their relationships with Kin (and weren't their own people beyond that), and Penny could've been a little less immature when the reader met her, more of a viable contender for Kin's heart. The agency itself felt a bit vague, and the rules and drawbacks of time travel could be a bit plot convenient. Kin's emotional journey, though, was reasonably interesting, and - like I said at the start - there is something to be said for a book that doesn't overanalyze itself, so I wound up giving it the full fourth star.

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