Here and Now and Then
- by Mike Chen
- Novel
- Science Fiction
- Adults
- Definite Time Travel
- English
- Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen (Mira, January 2019).
When time travel agent Kin Stewart finds himself rapidly losing his memory and stranded in 1996, he writes a journal of his life in the future and proceeds to break every rule in the book by creating a new life and family in his new present . . . until a retriever shows up in 2014.
—Michael Main
Science fiction. She thought the journal was filled with tales, like her Doctor Who or Heather’s Star Trek shows.
Tags
(12)
- Time Periods
- Circa AD 1970 to 1999: Kin originally lands in 1996.
- Circa AD 2000 to 2099: Kin, Heather, and Miranda
- Circa AD 2100 to 2199: Kin, Marcus, and Penny
- Timeline Models
- Time Travel Methods
- Luggable Time Machine: The accelerator is lugged to the jump point by the agent and/or the retriever.
- Themes
- Free Will, Fate, and Determinism: When Kin and Penny later meet Kin’s great-grandson, they incorrectly call the grandson’s earlier appearance a grandfather paradox, but it is not a grandfather paradox or even a self-defeating act. Instead, it is the kind of happening that occurs all the time in a single, static timeline. Kin and Penny are fated to save Miranda, thereby ensuring that Kin’s great-grandson will be born and show up before they head out on their rescue mission. This brings up issues of free will and predestination—what if the mission had failed or Kin had decided not to go through with it, but they had already heard the grandson before going on the mission—but these issues are only under the surface in the book, which interestingly, is not set in a single, static timeline.
- Letters, Texts, Phone Calls, Talking, and Other Direct Communications through Time: e-mail
- Long Life
- Self-Defeating Acts: When Kin and Penny are with Miranda, there is a good discussion of self-defeating acts (using the more specific phrase grandfather paradox) to explain why they can’t simply go back in time and steal Kin’s journal before Miranda sees it. If they did so, then there would be no reason for them to do so, so they would not do so. On the other hand, they miss the opportunity of identifying a potential kill-Hitler mission as also being a self-defeating act; instead, they say that such a mission would change the timeline catastrophically, so such attempts are presumably banned (even if there were enough power to go back that far in time). An earlier discussion of why Marcus could not rescue Kin from 1996 also refers to doing so as “grandfathering the mission” (because Marcus only knew of the problem by detecting the beacon from 2014). Still, that one might have been worked around by rescuing Kin in 1996 and then planting the beacon in 2014. Ah, well.
- Time Beacon: Kin’s broken beacon starts the whole affair.
- Time Cops: The TCB seems more like cops than a scientific time corps.
- Time Travel Sickness, Injuries, and Mixed-Up Body Parts: A traveler can’t hold two times in his mind for very long. Also, too much traveling is deadly without the right drugs.