Time’s Agent
Winner of the 2025 Phillip K. Dick Award
A multiverse story of love, loss, time travel, robots, and the Dominican Republic. “What would you do, given another universe, a do-over?”
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. Archeologist Raquel and her wife, Marlena, once dreamed that 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.
-One of Amazon’s Editor’s Picks for August, and a best book of the year from Esquire and Autostraddle.
“I was astonished by how many huge ideas could fit into this taut, swift novella by Brenda Peynado: it’s all at once a meditation on motherhood, grief, war, environmental collapse, dread, and the nature of memory and time; yet the book is miraculously also buoyant, thrilling, a breathless and headlong read for a breathtaking time on this planet. I ate it up.” -Lauren Groff
“There are huge, fascinating ideas laced throughout this story of shattering grief. Steeped in Peynado’s Dominican culture, the novel’s setting and its seemingly sudden destruction point to the evils of colonialism while demonstrating that this has all happened before and will again. Meanwhile, Raquel’s archeological research into her country’s destroyed history proves that hope and solutions can be found in unexpected times and places. Fans of Carmen Maria Machado will find in this debut novelist a new author to follow every bit as voraciously.” -Library Journal, Starred Review, SFF debut of the month
Brenda Peynado 