Mike Chen

To save his daughter, he'll go anywhere--and any-when... Kin Stewart is an everyday family man: working in IT, trying to keep the spark in his marriage, struggling to connect with his teenage daughter, Miranda. But his current life is a far cry from his previous career...as a time-traveling secret agent from 2142. Stranded in suburban San Francisco since the 1990s after a botched mission, Kin has kept his past hidden from everyone around him, despite the increasing blackouts and memory loss affecting his time-traveler's brain. Until one afternoon, his "rescue" team arrives--eighteen years too late. Their mission: return Kin to 2142, where he's only been gone weeks, not years, and where another family is waiting for him. A family he can't remember. Torn between two lives, Kin is desperate for a way to stay connected to both. But when his best efforts threaten to destroy the agency and even history itself, his daughter's very existence is at risk. It'll take one final trip across time to save Miranda--even if it means breaking all the rules of time travel in the process. A uniquely emotional genre-bending debut, Here and Now and Then captures the perfect balance of heart, playfulness, and imagination, offering an intimate glimpse into the crevices of a father's heart and its capacity to stretch across both space and time to protect the people that mean the most.

Here and Now and Then

Sarah Sammis

Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen is a time travel story set in 2014 and 2142 San Francisco. Quinoa "Kin" Stewart is a programmer in San Francisco. He's suffering from blackouts and debilitating headaches. He knows its from time travel; his wife and daughter think it's PTSD. All that changes when his best friend and handler from 2142 finds him and orders him home.

Time travel here works with the premise that the body can't handle different times. Memory loss or time induced amnesia as well as the headaches and heart damage are part and parcel of time travel. There are drugs and implants to help ease the process. Kin has taken out his implant and his long spate of time in the past has made travel more dangerous for him.

Travelers are supposed to lay low and avoid interacting with the past as much as possible. Kin has broken those protocols in the most extreme way imagined by marrying and fathering a child. The bulk of Here and Now and Then is the aftermath of having a family in the past and then leaving them there.

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To save his daughter, he'll go anywhere--and any-when...Kin Stewart is an everyday family man: working in IT, trying to keep the spark in his marriage, struggling to connect with his teenage daughter, Miranda. But his current life is a far cry from his previous career...as a time-traveling secret agent from 2142.Stranded in suburban San Francisco since the 1990s after a botched mission, Kin has kept his past hidden from everyone around him, despite the increasing blackouts and memory loss affecting his time-traveler's brain. Until one afternoon, his "rescue" team arrives--eighteen years too late.Their mission: return Kin to 2142, where he's only been gone weeks, not years, and where another family is waiting for him. A family he can't remember.Torn between two lives, Kin is desperate for a way to stay connected to both. But when his best efforts threaten to destroy the agency and even history itself, his daughter's very existence is at risk. It'll take one final trip across time to save Miranda--even if it means breaking all the rules of time travel in the process.A uniquely emotional genre-bending debut, Here and Now and Then captures the perfect balance of heart, playfulness, and imagination, offering an intimate glimpse into the crevices of a father's heart and its capacity to stretch across both space and time to protect the people that mean the most.

Shona Tiger

2.5, really. Uneven enough that I tuned out a few times, but a good-enough read.

Janice Hopper

Another time travel book, another secret-time-monitoring-agency-enforces-rules story.

Kin Stewart is a time agent. He'd been a decent one till that one time he got shot and the bullet buggered up his implanted recall device. What that means is that his partner doesn't get the word that Kin is ready to come home until almost two decades of Kin-time have passed. In that period, Kin, who's suffering from memory issues and headaches that he attributes to PTSD, has made a life for himself in the 20th century. He doesn't really remember his "real" life in the 22nd (I think) century, though some hints keep popping up in his mind.

Then a chance happening pings his recall unit, and his future time-cop partner appears to get him home. Home, where maybe a week or two has passed. So Kin gets snatched away from his wife and daughter. When he returns to his original timeline, he finds he has a fiancee and (now) a desk job in the Temporal Control Bureau. Because jumping around in time like he's done, staying in the past, etc., has messed up his body and it isn't really safe for him to go back in time again.

But Kin finds he can't forget about the family who thinks he just abandoned them. And what he's done also has implications for the future. There's a person alive (his daughter) who wouldn't be if he hadn't got stuck in the past. And from his future perspective, it looks like his daughter had a LOT of problems after he disappeared. Kin really wants to help. Really, REALLY wants to help.

How he does this is basically the rest of the book.

I thought the writing was perfectly cromulent here. I didn't really find it exciting or engrossing, but it was fine. I didn't quite buy all the convolutions that happened, but the ending was good, so that made up for a lot.

Cindy Lieberman

3.5. Enjoyable, light book about a man from the future stranded in the past...until he’s forced to return to the future leaving his wife and daughter behind.

To save his daughter, he’ll go anywhere—and any-when… Kin Stewart is an everyday family man: working in IT, trying to keep the spark in his marriage, struggling to connect with his teenage daughter, Miranda. But his current life is a far cry from his previous career…as a time-traveling secret agent from 2142. Stranded in suburban San Francisco since the 1990s after a botched mission, Kin has kept his past hidden from everyone around him, despite the increasing blackouts and memory loss affecting his time-traveler’s brain. Until one afternoon, his “rescue” team arrives—eighteen years too late. Their mission: return Kin to 2142, where he’s only been gone weeks, not years, and where another family is waiting for him. A family he can’t remember. Torn between two lives, Kin is desperate for a way to stay connected to both. But when his best efforts threaten to destroy the agency and even history itself, his daughter’s very existence is at risk. It’ll take one final trip across time to save Miranda—even if it means breaking all the rules of time travel in the process. A uniquely emotional genre-bending debut, Here and Now and Then captures the perfect balance of heart, playfulness, and imagination, offering an intimate glimpse into the crevices of a father’s heart and its capacity to stretch across both space and time to protect the people that mean the most.

A Novel

4.5 stars, rounded up because I HAVE BEEN EMOTIONALLY COMPROMISED

Time travel kind of hurts my brain. As a result, time travel science fiction both fascinates and frustrates me, and is usually pretty hit or miss. This one, though, is definitely a hit. The story was tight, it made sense, the ins and outs such as the grandfather paradox are clearly explained. It was very well done.

I would've liked some more world-building in the "future" though. One slang word ("crown," which I thought was overused) and one new culinary discovery (Mars spices) didn't do enough for me. There was a fair bit of talk about how deep frying things was archaic and they had "new methods" of cooking but I really wish this were expanded upon more. It's touches like that that'll really elevate a story told in another time.

That's really my only criticism though. I was immediately hooked by the story and it didn't let me go the whole time. I found it very emotional towards the end, I teared up several times (though to be fair, the first instance was over a dog and then it just kept happening at anything slightly emotional haha).

Overall, I loved it!

Casie Blevins

Smart, sharp, imaginative. Great read. Thoroughly enjoyed and highly recommend. Brilliantly plotted. I will definitely read his future books. I hope they make this a movie. What an incredible visual it would make.

Jessica Smith

I wasn't completely sold on this novel in the beginning, but man did I get more and more sucked in. This is a novel about time travel, and in particular about how an amoral bureaucracy has established a hardline monopoly over time travel. In this the book is somewhat similar thematically to The Psychology of Time Travel, which I also really enjoyed. However, in Here and Now and Then the emphasis is less on the world-building and ensemble cast and more on one singular POV character and his emotional turmoil as the bureaucracy's bungles and subsequent callousness put his family into jeopardy.

At the outset of the story, Kin Stewart is apparently an ordinary suburban dad, happy husband to Heather and devoted dad to 14yo Miranda. The secret he's hiding, though, is that he's actually a time-travelling agent from 2142, stranded around 20 years ago after the equipment that had been supposed to return him home broke, and the agency he worked for failed to pick him up again when they were meant to. The agency's protocol stated that he was supposed to lie low and remain uninvolved with the world until they could collect him, but come on – for 20 years?! Kin gave up on all hope the agency would retrieve him, and let himself live his life. In what is described as a survival mechanism (because, in this book, human psychology can't handle remembering two different eras of time as “the present” without medicinal aids), Kin forgets all about his life in 2142, but doesn't forget his semantic memories about being a time traveller, working for the agency he works for, the internal policies and hierarchies of that agency, etc. Or at least, not immediately. Concerned that he might be forgetting some of it, he writes down everything he can in a journal. He is also beset by strange headaches and black-outs, which he passes off to his family as untreated PTSD.

But then, one day, a strange man (Markus) appears to return Kin to his “home” era in time. Kin is, as you'd expect, extremely reluctant to go home. However, since Heather fails to be persuaded to uproot their lives to go into hiding from some mysterious threat, and Markus assures him that his abrupt disappearance from the 2010s will be “clean”, Kin acquiesces and lets himself be taken home.

What follows is a story that really surprised me with its emotional strength. In his home era, Kin is reintroduced to his fiancée, Penny, and even though his memories of her come back, the emotional intimacy and warmth is something Kin has to rebuild from scratch. From his new desk job, he can't resist looking up what happened to his family after he left, is horrified by what he discovers, and then concocts a scheme to intervene through emails without his employer finding out. When his employer inevitably does find out and sacks him on the spot, he is forced to intervene through even more drastic measures.

Overall, this is a really compelling story about a man trying to do what's right by everyone he cares about, coming up constantly against the unfeeling coldness of the bureaucracy he works for. The book doesn't set its expectations too high – Kin isn't trying to bring down the whole establishment, he just wants to save his daughter – which gives it all an intimate feel. And the characters feel realistic and I surprised myself by how strongly I cared about them by the story's end (except Markus, that guy pissed me off to no end). If you like time travel plots with an emotional punch, this is a good choice.

Here and Now and Then

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