Wesley Chu’s Time Salvager opens on a familiar scene. The spaceship captain of the High Marker stands on his bridge and receives status reports in standard sci-fi gobbledygook: “Shield arms down!” “Mobility thrusters offline!” “Aft hull breached!” “Get me one damn shield arm and I can deflect the blast!” Captain Kirk and Han Solo wander around somewhere off to the side, half-visible ghosts of sci-fi space opera past.
The ship passes quickly out of the story, but the clichés stand their ground. The world of Time Salvager is not vividly imagined or distinctive; instead it’s slapped together from old, banged-up genre tropes and narratives. In part, this is a function of the fact that Time Salvagers’ world is, even by its own lights, a mess. It is a run-down, dingy, far-future civilization reminiscent of many of Philip K Dick’s schlubby dystopias. Humanity is out of energy, food and resources; everything is slowly crumbling into “an enroaching plague of shit”. In the face of this disintegration, humanity relies on time-traveling Chronmen like James Griffin-Mars to raid the past for technology, fuel and food, providing stopgap salvage until someone, somehow, can figure out how to rebuild the world permanently.
This conceit offers a cornucopia of genre set-pieces. There’s a trip to the Nazi era. There’s a reference to artificial intelligence wars, which you know all about because you’ve seen Terminator. There’s an Orwellian thought-control period that references Big Brother by name.
The flatness extends to the characters, too – for example, the spunky red-haired scientist named Elise. She’s the novel’s strong female character and Manic Pixie Dream Girl, whose purpose is to provide the predictably wounded hero James with light and hope. Time travelers always have to steal their salvage right before big disasters, since it causes the least time disruption to take items that are about to be destroyed anyway. Thus James has seen lots of death, and has serious PTSD. But Elise salves his soul. “[S]he was so animated and alive.” Yep. Of course she was.
While the lack of imagination isn’t exactly enjoyable, it is thematic. Chu is, after all, just doing what his Chronmen do – raiding the past to build a clunky present. Time Salvager can be read as a metaphor for our entire media landscape. Ageing superheroes in tights wander painfully across our movie screens, and we use the latest technology to obsess nostalgically about sub-par 1970s television shows. The future – our future – doesn’t invent anything anymore; it just cannabilises geriatric icons. Chu even includes his own elderly super-saviour, when James whooshes to the past to bring back the 93-year-old high scion Grace Priestly, genius pioneer of time theory.
The most eager repackagers of content in our own day are media corporations. And so it’s appropriate that Time Salvager’s villains are shadowy, conscienceless corporate conglomerates. Chu hints that the capitalists’ past depredations are in fact responsible for the environmental devastation on his fictional earth. That nods at our own environmental troubles; climate change, after all, is caused by corporate drilling into the buried past to excavate dinosaur bones. The planet is made up of layers and layers of history, which we grind up and repurpose in the name of progress. How long can we keep salvaging the excess capacity of our evolutionary forebears before we start to damage our descendants?
Time Salvager isn’t exactly focused on answering that question. It’s more interested in hitting its suspenseful sci-fi plot points – the escalating danger, the big boss battles, the budding romance and, most of all, the healing of its bad-boy antihero. James and Elise, hiding from the evil corporations, connect with a group of low-tech stragglers out in the wilderness that Boston has become. The tribe represents the (supposed) goodness of humanity’s past; a kind of mash-up of everything from Fenimore Cooper’s Indians to the ewoks. In these adorable holdovers, loner James finds the community he needs, and is motivated to reveal his hidden depths of compassion and general beneficence. “Listen mister,” Elise says, like many a heroine before her. “You work way too hard pretending to be a stone golem, but you’re a really good guy.”
And James is a good guy, just like all the other good guys you’ve read about. In Time Salvager you don’t have anything to build the future on except the past. Chu’s novel isn’t a great book, but it cobbles together an unsettling message. The future, in Chu’s vision, appears less like a glittering possibility and more like a shoddy retread. The best stories have already been told. All that’s left is to cut them up for scrap.
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