It means that there are no changes to history, though the times when things don’t go quite as planned usually work themselves out with months or years, leaving the future timeline as it was.
They do this through pillaging, stealing, and salvaging items when they won’t be missed – just before disasters, crashes, and unexplained losses that they can confirm from history. With the time laws in place, chronmen travel to points in the past where any action they take will have minimum effects, if any at all. I mentioned earlier that I am not usually a fan of time travel, but I did enjoy the way Chu built a system within the pages of this story that allows for a larger degree of freedom than I normally expect. It is the choice to save Elise Kim that leads to a chain of events that could bring the salvation of Earth, if only they can stay alive long enough… On a mission to a critical point in history, a mission that promises retirement for both him and his handler of its successful completion, James breaks the first time law – not to bring anybody back to his present.
But he is jaded, and seemingly coming to the end of what is often a short life for chronmen. James Griffin-Mars is one such chronman, sent repeatedly to events in the past to harvest and return items that are deemed priorities for humanity to continue to survive. With corporations often making requests for salvage from the past, and energy a much-needed source, there is plenty for the dwindling ranks of chronmen to do. It is with time travel that the current human civilisation remains alive – the chronmen travel back to periods in history to gather supplies needed for the here and now. In the future, Earth is nothing but a toxic planet following the worldwide spread of a bacterium in the 22 nd century, with humans now living throughout the solar system. Perhaps this is why it’s taken me some extra months before finally sitting down to read Time Salvager, and disappointed I was not.
I have to be honest, time travel is not my favourite of topics, and I find that more often than not stories can either corner themselves with too much internal logic, or simply fail to use the idea to its full advantage. When Time Salvager was announced I was excited to see Chu expand into a new setting and was left wondering what type of story he would deliver. If, like me, you came to Wesley Chu’s writing through his excellent Tao novels ( Lives of Tao, Deaths of Tao, Rebirths of Tao), then you know that he is an author that can not only tell a good story, but one that is intricately plotted and filled with interesting characters.
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