Time Salvager

 
 

Time Salvager

by Wesley Chu

Tor

2015 

 

 

I think I actually started this project with a time travel novel I was reading over New Year's. But while The Tourist was more of a satire and puzzle, set primarily among time traveling tourists in the present day, Time Salvager is a bit harder scifi. 

 
In the solar system of the 2500s, there is no central government, and a handful of mega-corporations hold almost all the power. The last golden age ended by 2100, and it's been downhill ever since, with a series of ruinous interplanetary wars decimating the population and the environment. The ability to build any of the wonders of the past is gone. Humanity only survives because the 'ChronMen' use time travel to secretly visit the past and steal resources from right before major disasters where they'd be destroyed anyway.

 
Ever since watching First Contact, I've been a fan of scenarios where someone from the far future visits the near future. William Gibson's The Peripheral does it too. Every version of La Jetee and 12 Monkeys have envisioned time travel being used on scavenging and salvaging missions. And the tv show Loki is the most recent example I can think of where time travelers jump very close to cataclysmic events because they know their presence will have no effect. Also the ChronMen all have forcefield devices that work kind of like Green Lantern rings, or I guess like Lensman lenses.

 
So I like the setup for Time Salvager, although I kind of think it might make a better roleplaying game than it does a novel.

 
James is one of the best ChronMen, but lately he's been suffering from more time travel sickness, he's haunted by his sister who disappeared when they were children, and he's wracked with guilt over all the people he's watched die instead of saving them. (He's very literally haunted, by overly lifelike hallucinations and dreams where they scold him for letting them die.) 

 
James is getting close to quitting or killing himself when the nonprofit, quasi-governmental organization he works for gets an offer from a megacorp to steal some parts from a golden age arctic science facility right before it exploded. Some of the details seem fishy, but the pay is so good James could practically retire, so he accepts. 

 
During his two days of pre-explosion scouting, James has a meet cute with a scientist named Elise, and goes on a date with her so he can copy her keycard access. Then the giant explosion happens and he steals the parts, but he can't leave immediately because there's a rip in time caused by somebody else having time traveled to this same location before him. He waits, and ends up protecting Elise with his force field while they watch everyone else dying of radiation poisoning around them. When he can finally jump home, James breaks the rules and brings Elise with him.

 
James and Elise are very quickly forced to become fugitives on the environmentally devastated 'present day' Earth of the 2500s. The sun gives you radiation burns, the air reeks of greasy smoke that sticks to everything, the oceans are covered with thick layers of brown scum. While camping in the ruins of Boston, they find and are adopted by a tribe of wasteland dwellers who are essentially non-people as far as the megacorps are concerned. 

 
James uses his time travel equipment to benefit the tribe, and Elise continues searching for the cure for the 'earth virus' that had just been discovered in her time and is partially responsible for the awful state of the planet in James's. And of course the megacorp funder and the time travel agency are hunting for them, since James is a traitor and Elise is a time anomaly, setting up a big climactic forcefield fight at the end. 

 
We also learn that the corp paid a previous time traveler to set the bomb that destroyed the research station. This probably didn't change history much because WWIII breaks out so soon afterward and would've killed all those people anyway, but it's an ugly use of a supposedly beneficial technology to advance one company's interests. The corp is also incredibly brutal and heavy-handed toward the various Earth tribes while they search for James and Elise.

 
My favorite parts of the book were the glimpses at all the future wars and disasters that James could jump into, including a time during the AI Wars when Mountain Hulks flattened cities like glaciers. Early on, we see a rogue time agent jump to the Ming Dynasty and start a martial arts legend that changes history, and James steals the famous missing Amber Room from a Nazi castle before it's bombed. I kind of hate things like that, that purport to explain some real world phenomenon with fictional time travel. Those also both felt like misses opportunities to go somewhere cooler in the imagined future.

 
James's hardboiled cynicism and Elise's initial naivety both seemed kind of cliched and overstated, but I think Chu came into his strength when the pair were joining the tribe. Chu seemed to have a realistic view of what survival in that environment would require, and by putting both characters to work on a greater good (even though they both ostensibly had altruistic careers before that) he was able to show a side of them that he could render more humanely. The various side characters, most of them from the time travel agency, remained more one-dimensional throughout the book.

 
This one sort of ends on a cliffhanger, since the corporation is sure to make another try at coming after James and Elise after their first attempt fails. And we need to see what happens with the 'cure the virus' plot, and the whole 'corporation using its money to corrupt a supposedly neutral government agency' plot. There is a sequel. But based on where this one ends, I kind of feel like I know the basic outlines of what will happen next. I also fear Chu might give in to the temptation to make the entire crapsack future be the fault of corporate-sponsored time travelers repeatedly sabotaging humanity; this wouldn't really make any sense, and if he goes that route, I'd rather not see it.