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. 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. The flatness extends to the characters, too – for example, the spunky red-haired scientist named Elise. There’s an Orwellian thought-control period that references Big Brother by name.

There’s a reference to artificial intelligence wars, which you know all about because you’ve seen Terminator. This conceit offers a cornucopia of genre set-pieces. 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. Humanity is out of energy, food and resources everything is slowly crumbling into “an enroaching plague of shit”. It is a run-down, dingy, far-future civilization reminiscent of many of Philip K Dick’s schlubby dystopias. In part, this is a function of the fact that Time Salvagers’ world is, even by its own lights, a mess. The world of Time Salvager is not vividly imagined or distinctive instead it’s slapped together from old, banged-up genre tropes and narratives. The ship passes quickly out of the story, but the clichés stand their ground. 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. Wesley Chu’s Time Salvager opens on a familiar scene.

Time salvager series