Time Salvagerby Wesley ChuTor, 2015The distant-future setting of Wesley Chu's new novel Time Salvager is one in which mankind's fate is bleak and furtive:

No government or corporation claimed dominion over Earth anymore. Why bother? There were few resources left to exploit, and parts of the atmosphere were so poisonous that it might as well have been Uranus. That left each of the hundred or so remaining large cities to form their own states alongside the few thousand scattered remnants of the population that now lived in the wastelands or deep underground. There hadn't been a census taken of Earth for over a hundred years, but ChronoCom estimated there were now fewer than a hundred million people living on the planet of their origin.

Those few remaining isolated cities of poor wasted Earth are hungry for the energy they need to keep going, and ChronoCom has come up with a solution: send specially-trained operatives called “chronmen” back into the past in order to pilfer sources of energy and income and funnel it back to the future (fans of Kage Baker's “Company” novels will recognize the concept, since it's identical). Chronmen wield fierce technology in the pursuit of their job, and the job itself naturally takes a severe toll:

Officially known as time operatives, chronmen had to be intelligent, quick to adapt to changing situations, and be good actors. They also must have short memories of their past assignments … Good chronmen also shared negative traits. They tended to be anti-social, short-tempered, excessively violent, and borderline suicidal.

Chronmen are carefully trained and drilled with a strict set of rules to follow in order to avoid disrupting the timestream, and the first of these rules is as simple as it is predictable: you can't bring anybody from the past back with you. Chronman and convicted criminal James Griffin-Mars knows this rule as well as any veteran, and since he's – bear with me here – one mission short of retirement, he's not about to ignore it. Until he goes back in time and meets a scientist named Elise Kim and feels compelled to bring her forward in time.This crime immediately makes him a wanted man, and he and Elise Kim go on the run, pursued relentlessly by the novel's best-realized character, a Chronocom auditor named Levin Javier-Oberon, who's determined to bring them in for punishment even though the scientist from the past might possess the key to saving the future.So just like that, you find yourself in the world of the novel's great US cover illustration by Richard Anderson: two intrepid heroes running hand-in-hand in a glow of light in the well of a dark techno-world – in other words, the same hackneyed scenario that's been at the heart of four hundred cheesy Hollywood movies. In related news, Chu has sold the movie rights to Time Salvager. Michael Bay will be directing.