A Goodreads Choice Awards 2019 Semifinalist One of BookBub’s Best Science Fiction Books of 2019 One of Book Riot’s Best Books of 2019 So Far One of The Nerd Daily’s Best Debut Novels of 2019 Featured in The Millions “A Year in Reading” One of Entropy’s Best Fiction Books of 2019 He’ll go anywhere and any when to save his daughter Kin Stewart is an everyday family man: working in IT, trying … 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.
But his current life is a far cry from his previous career…as a time-traveling secret agent from over a century in the future.
Stranded in suburban San Francisco since the 1990s after a botched mission, Kin has kept his past hidden from everyone around him, until one afternoon, his “rescue” team arrives–eighteen years too late.
Their mission: return Kin to 2142, where he’s been gone only weeks, not years, and where another family is waiting for him. A family he can’t remember.
Torn between two lives, Kin’s desperate efforts to stay connected to both will threaten to destroy the agency and even history itself. With his daughter’s very existence at risk, he will have to take one final trip to save her–even if it means breaking all the rules of time travel in the process.
“Heartfelt and thrilling… Chen’s concept is unique, and [his characters’] agony is deeply moving. Quick pacing, complex characters, and a fascinating premise.”–Publishers Weekly, starred review
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This book. THIS BOOK. It made my heart so happy while also making me sob like a baby.
If you loved The Time Traveler’s Wife, you need this book. It’s about Kin, a special agent for the Temporal Correction Bureau (TCB) in the year 2142 who gets stranded in the 1990s after a botched mission. Over 18 years, he builds a life for himself, marrying and having a daughter, eventually losing memories of his former life because of time travel brain destabilization. But when the TCB finally locates Kin, they haul him back to 2142, where a family he can’t remember is waiting for him. He’s desperate to stay connected to his daughter from the ’90s, and when he finds out her life’s in jeopardy, he’ll do anything to save her—even if his efforts might destroy history.
This is such a fun read—the world building is excellent, and you really feel for Kin as he gets torn between two lives, two families. And no spoilers, but ALL OF THE TEARS HAVE HAPPENED. Basically, you need this book.
You don’t have to be a Doctor Who fan to appreciate this unique time-travel story, but if you are, you’ll be especially pleased. “To save his daughter, he’ll go anywhere–and any-when” is the logline, and that helps illustrate that this story might take place in the future, but it’s very contemporary in its heart. The characters live and breathe, and the technology is handled so deftly that I urge you to give it a chance. A heartwarming story that’s all about love and family, wrapped in a fascinating conundrum that gives it real spice!
This book completely clicked for me; I couldn’t stop reading it. There’s a time-travel plot (which I love, as a fan of Connie Willis’s Oxford books) with deep characterization. What would it be like to be torn between two times? To love people in both of them? Motivations are complex, but all the main characters are, at heart, motivated by love. It’s hopeful and lovely, with an unexpected but satisfying resolution.
What a lovely, lyrical, surprisingly original time travel tale this was! Chen has a marvelous ability to transform words on a page into fully three-dimensional characters, characters that virtually leap out of his book and into your life such that you cannot help but be fully drawn into their dramas and heartbreaks. Time travel as a genre is, by now, getting somewhat formulaic. Or at least I had thought so. But Chen’s take on the subject felt fresh and engaging and captured my imagination in a way that nothing has since Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. This isn’t your average, roam-through-time-righting-wrongs time travel story; it has heart and depth and a complexity that I found wholly entertaining page after page. The writing is lovely, as is the plot and the underlying message about the lengths to which a father will go to protect his daughter. But it is really the characters that make this one so phenomenal… They are fully formed early on, yet continue to grow and develop and surprise you throughout the course of the book.
This was a marvelous story and I’m definitely eager for more from Mike Chen!
Thanks to NetGalley for my review copy.
Mike Chen is a master of time-fiction writing, but this book is so much more than that. The writing is a combination of technical, lyrical, and emotional, each sentence carefully crafted. The story is intricate, a mix of time-travel, family drama, and adventure. Kin Stewart, a time-traveling cop, is lost in the past, has a family, then has to return to the future to save his family. Thus, he is torn between two world, his past and his present, leading you on a nail-biting journey, full of plot twists and emotional choices. Kin is a well-developed character and a man that would do anything to make the women in his life safe and happy and, just for that, Mike Chen deserves 5 stars. This book is an absolute delight and I strongly recommend it.
This debut novel by Mike Chen is a delightful blend of SciFi and Literary that has a great blend of characters, time-travel and intrigue to keep you reading. A thoroughly enjoyable read.
When you read the synopsis for a book, you generally get an idea of where a story is going to go. Same with the first chapter. Well written copy and a good hook pull you in fast, and the reason you keep reading is that you’re eager to get to the other side – to the conclusion you’re already anticipating. It’s for this reason that I’m not particularly put off by spoilers. (This review contains none. Not for this book.) Yeah, okay, I might have preferred to know that Glenn doesn’t die in The Walking Dead (sorry, not sorry, you didn’t already know?) but the anticipation of that moment definitely formed a part of my watching experience, and in some respects, enhanced it. But that’s another story. What I’m really trying to say is that any good book is a journey and like all good journeys, you have a hope for the end but don’t mind a few surprises along the way.
What I loved about Here and Now and Then, first and foremost, were the surprises along the way. I had a good idea of where this story was going and I had hopes for the ending, but getting there was some of the most enjoyable reading I’ve undertaken this year. There are no great twists and turns; it’s the way author Mike Chen handled difficult situations that sets this book apart from every other story about a parent who will do anything for their child. It’s Kin, himself, who is wonderfully fallible and also complex. But simple, too, in that his motives are easy to understand and identify with. He’s extremely likable. The secondary characters were full of surprises too. I particularly loved the arc of Penny. Nope, not going to tell you who she is. All I will say is that she’s a phenomenal character and if I had any complaints about this book, it would have been that I’d have liked her point of view on a few things.
So, what’s the book about? The cover copy will tell you that. What I can add is that it’s about the guy who’ll do anything for his daughter. It’s a great blend of contemporary fiction and science fiction. The time travel stuff is well thought out and just about always plausible, but trying to second guess any of the author’s explanations for paradoxes really only becomes a paradox in itself, because this is sci-fi and so often you just have to say it works because it works and get on with the story.
More and more, I’ve come to value the experience of reading a book alongside the enjoyment factor of the plot. Here and Now and Then is one of those books where both counted. I loved the story. I put off work so I could read just one more chapter. I had to reach for a tissue at the end. And I enjoyed the experience of reading. Of discovering a new author and having an appreciation for the way he decided to do things.
I definitely recommend this one.
As a teenager, I was a big sci-fi fan but drifted away from the genre. Mike Chen’s Here and Now and Then is good enough to bring me back. His novel exceeded my expectations. It really is a genre-breaking combination of time-travel, family drama, and hero’s journey—with a literary bent. The book contains enough techno-jargon and discussions of time-travel paradoxes to be true to the genre, but not enough to bog the reader down. The logic behind Chen’s time-travel seems plausible which makes it intellectually appealing. I was never left wondering if anything could really have happened: Chen made me believe.
Stranded on a mission to the past, time-traveling cop Kin Stewart figures he is lost forever. So he does what seems logical: he adapts, eventually marries and has a family. As his daughter reaches high-school age, Kin is rescued—too late as far as he’s concerned. But to avoid harm to his family, he agrees to return to the future. Because of a time discrepancy—two weeks in the future (2142) is roughly two decades in the past (1996)—Kin has to deal with his past (which chronologically is his life in the future), his current life with a wife and daughter in the past, and his future life with a fiancée he doesn’t remember.
Here and Now and Then, through well-plotted twists and turns, paints a portrait of a man forced to make impossible choices, a man forced to simultaneously experience his past and his future. His choices were so poignant I found myself sniffling toward the end—I don’t remember a sci-fi book ever making me cry. I was fully drawn into Kin’s character, and the three women in his life, wife, fiancée, and daughter were well-developed and nicely complemented various aspects of Kin’s personality.
Great story, interesting worlds and theories we got to explore. Kin faced several hard choices in this book and I wasn’t sure how it would turn out. Loved the ending!
This is straightforward time travel SF adventure story. Except, not really. It is really about a man, a time traveling secret agent, who through no fault of his own, has memory problems and ends up living two separate lives: one in the early 21st century and one in 2142. He has to abandon the family he has in the past but he cannot bring himself to abandon his daughter. Which eventually causes trouble and the disruption of his life in 2142. This is not a time-traveling 007 type of story. It is much slower. The spends a lot of time listening to the agent’s confused thoughts and feelings as he wrestles with issues of family, love, commitment, abandonment, guilt, even personal identity and above all else, his love for and the need to protect his daughter. The first third of the book introduces the characters and the central conflict, the middle drags a bit and the last third of the book moves along nicely. Definitely worth the ride – though sometimes it is slower and a little longer than I would like.
A wonderful story of family and time travel. I really connected with this story, both as a nerd, and as a father.
This was a fun enough time travel story, with some thriller moments. I picked this one up on impulse at the library when it was first out – the cover and premise intrigued me, but didn’t happen to get to it then. Finally got around to picking it back up this month, and I’m glad I did. It didn’t drag, and was easy to get through in a day.
This is a marvelous time travel story that builds more off the relationships and personalities of its characters than the time travel angle alone. Beautifully written.
I couldn’t figure out how this book would end.
Set only about 100 years in the future, this time traveling tale takes its characters through their love, loss, and redemption in the most believable manner. It is a good and satisfying introduction to science fiction.
½ stars, rounded up for the effort
I really wish I could give this novel a better rating, but it just didn’t make the greatness cut for me.
It had this awful and stilted translated-from-another-language feel, all the way through. Everything was worded accurately, but hardly ever appropriately, more like a graphic novel than an actual words-only book. The text was littered with short sentence fragments, appearing just as often as actual sentences. I felt like I was reading the novel version of Joey’s recommendation letter for Monica and Chandler to adopt a child.
“His heart had sprinted at the mere notion for minutes now.”
See what I mean? It’s just off somehow. Plus, in Audible, the narrator did the audio version no favors. He read with the weirdest cadence, like he couldn’t figure out how to make heads or tails of the writing either! On a brighter note, I got to test out just how fast I could crank up the playback speed in my Audible app before I had trouble keeping up. (Apparently my max is 1.20% and then I’m approaching seizure territory.)
So, my take: two and a half stars for a semi-original adventure idea turned into a fun little romp through time with no unnecessary violence, sex, or foul language. It was simply a nice story that kinda needed an editor to stop the stilted insanity and give this baby some flow.
Really enjoyed
My type of SF. Real world situations cleverly woven into a time travel scenario.
I enjoy science fiction conundrums and this book fit the bill. It was a good time travel story that made reference to some of my favorite time travel movies and TV shows and wasn’t too mind boggling. A good escape.
I recommended it to my book group. They are not into science fiction; I am. I chose this book because it was touted as sci-fi for people who don’t like sci-fi. I liked this book; as sci-fi, I didn’t love it. But my book group liked it because it wasn’t “heavy sci-fi”, it had a good story and good characters that you cared about.
It was also a page-turner. You couldn’t predict what was going to happen.
My only complaint was that the “future” world was not drawn In detail. If not for that, I would have given it 5 stars.