Here and Now and Then – Mike Chen

MIRA Books | Hardcover | January 29, 2019

Mike Chen has given us a genre-bending blockbuster of a novel. Kin Steward is a Temporal Corruption Bureau (TCB) secret agent who gets stuck in 1996 after a time travel mission goes awry. But rather than try to get back to the future or wait around for someone to save him Kin moves on with his life. He gets a job, falls in love, and raises a family. But when a TCB retriever shows up to bring Kin back to the future he has no choice but to comply. To minimize timeline corruption and protect his family Kin agrees to go back to the future only to find an unfamiliar life waiting for him.

No matter how hard Kin tries to go with the flow though, he can't get over abandoning his family - especially Miranda. But when Kin finds a way to contact Miranda from the future he unknowingly puts her life in jeopardy and he soon finds himself in a race against time to save her.

Chen has done a fantastic job of balancing the "man out of time" theme that we often see in sci-fi fiction with the "absent father" theme that we typically see in literary fiction. What allows Chen to do this so seamlessly is his decision to have Kin's emotional vulnerability drive the story forward. So while Here and Now and Then is set in a speculative world, it is actually a character-driven novel at its core. Kin's love for his daughter and his desire to be a part of her life is what propels the novel forward. The conflicts and consequences are all due to Kin's own decisions, which makes him a more relatable character that readers - regardless of their genre preferences - will be able to connect with and want to follow anywhere and anywhen.