By Georgia Jackson, College of Arts and Sciences
“What would you do, given another universe, a do-over?”
This is the question animating Brenda Peynado’s novel “Time’s Agent,” which received the Philip K. Dick Award, on April 18.
For Peynado, an assistant professor in the Department of English, the award — named for the late science fiction writer and author of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and “The Man in the High Castle” — is an “immense honor.”
“This book began as a confrontation with colonialism, corporate greed, environmental collapse and with myself,” she wrote in an email that was read aloud during the awards ceremony in Seattle, Wash. “It’s an immense honor to receive the Philip K. Dick Award, named for a writer whose fractured realities continue to shape the futures we dare to write.”
“We cannot create new worlds if we don’t first face the one we’ve already made.” — Brenda Peynado
In Peynado’s novel, which was published by Tor Publishing Group, pocket worlds exist. But they don’t hold the key to the universe’s mysteries like Raquel and her wife Marlena once hoped. Instead, each pocket world — a geographically small, hidden offshoot of reality — is controlled by a corporation intent on turning a profit.
“We live in a world that teaches us to monetize every breath; to sell our time, our attention, our desires,” said Peynado, who is also author of “The Rock Eaters,” a collection of speculative short stories that tackle class, immigration and xenophobia. “In ‘Time’s Agent,’ people barter their minutes, abandon their pasts. But both speeding up to our consequences and slowing down to each moment can reveal our deepest losses, our brightest hopes. I wanted to write a story for those out of sync with the world they’ve inherited, a story that might still offer the chance to love, to mend, to choose differently.”
Brenda Peynado signs a copy of her book "Time's Agent" for a reader.
In “Time’s Agent,” Raquel and Marlena grieve the loss of their daughter and upload her consciousness to the only device they have access to: a robodog.
“Raquel promises herself she will give her daughter a perfect day. As you can imagine, the world gets in the way. She reboots her daughter at night, resets her to forget, with the promise that the next day will be perfect. And, in the story, she even has new worlds, parallel universes, to try to get it right. World after world, day after day, she fails,” Peynado said.
But, while she was drafting the book, Peynado got stuck.
“Midway through writing, I really struggled to write forward,” Peynado said. “I couldn’t find a way out for Raquel or her daughter.”
It wasn’t until a good friend of hers suggested the story needed to explore the protagonist’s own complicity that the rest of the story “unlocked” for Peynado.
“How could she contend with fixing the world if she wasn’t able to face her own part in it? Once I started exploring that, the rest of the story came together,” Peynado said.
Now, in the Department of English at USF, Peynado makes sure to encourage her own students to examine the ways in which the heroes and villains that appear in their stories are alike.
“In what ways are the hero and villain part of the same system pushing them both into relentless conflict?” Peynado said. “How is the main character complicit in their own unmaking? And how, once they are able to face themselves, are they able to make a different choice?
“We cannot create new worlds if we don’t first face the one we’ve already made.”
Previous winners and nominees of the Philip K. Dick award, established in 1983, include writers J. M. Coetzee, Karen Joy Fowler, Kim Stanley Robinson and Scott Westerfield.