Convicted criminal James Griffin-Mars is no one’s hero. In his time, Earth is a toxic, abandoned world and humans have fled into the outer solar system to survive, eking out a fragile, doomed existence among the other planets and their moons. Those responsible for delaying humanity’s demise believe time travel holds the key, and they have identified James, troubled though he is, as one of a select and expendable few ideally suited for the most dangerous job in history.

James is a chronman, undertaking missions into Earth’s past to recover resources and treasure without altering the timeline. The laws governing use of time travel are absolute; break any one of them and, one way or another, your life is over. Most chronmen never reach old age; the stress of each jump through time, compounded by the risk to themselves and to the future, means that many chronmen rapidly reach their breaking point, and James Griffin-Mars is nearing his.

On a final mission that is to secure his retirement, James meets Elise Kim, an intriguing scientist from a previous century, who is fated to die during the destruction of an oceanic rig. Against his training and his common sense, and in violation of the chronmen’s highest law, James brings Elise back to the future with him, saving her life, but turning them both into fugitives. Remaining free means losing themselves in the wild and poisonous wastes of Earth, somehow finding allies, and perhaps discovering what hope may yet remain for humanity’s home world.

The charter was the culmination and moral principle of the past ten years of her research. The technology was ready. All humanity needed was a force that could responsibly wield this new power. If her new agency was successful, Grace Priestly would be credited with not only saving mankind, but propelling the Technology Isolationists to new heights. That allorium-engraved charter he held in his hands was the guiding law of this new agency, Chronological Regulatory Command, and it would lead them out of humanity’s self-inflicted starvation.

Wesley Chu’s Time Salvager presents a bleak vision of mankind hundreds of years in the future. While technology has advanced to the point of interplanetary travel and colony settlement, supplies are running low. Luckily for the human race, they’ve perfected time travel! Using this technology, a select few are tasked with going into the past and bringing back resources in an effort to further humanity’s survival.

In order to keep colonies on the Jovian moons, Mars, etc. going Chronmen- trained, heavily armed operators who can travel back in time – range through history, salvaging resources and energy sources from places where their absences won’t be missed (the reactor of a sinking battleship, for example, or logs from a forest that is about to burn down). All Chronmen work for a neutral agency that is regularly hired by a fairly stock-standard group of Evil Dystopia Corporations (Could we start calling them EDCs? They are so, so common in SF) and are policed by even more heavily armed auditors, who enforce strict time laws and work to capture or kill agents who attempt to desert their duty and flee into the past. As you can imagine, looting the past for salvage is a stressful, dangerous job made worse by the fact that humanity’s history is so much better than the miserable present that the Chronmen return to, and the suicide rate in the trade is massive.

James Griffin-Mars has traveled to hundreds of historic disasters where he has looted useful resources then left the people relying on them to die. He’s a burnt out wreck, and is close to suicide, until he breaks the most important time law of all and sets his life on a new and dangerous trajectory, pitting himself against his old employer. Of course, there is a corporate conspiracy to be uncovered, and a love interest, and a chance to save the earth, which the corporations have turned into a ruined ball of brown muck.

You’ve seen these plot developments before, and the execution isn’t great here. The writing is occasionally clunky, and tends towards exposition- there is a great deal of ‘tell’ rather than show. The characters are also pretty clichéd- the burnt out, alcoholic operative who rebels against a corrupt system, the pretty, idealistic scientist type that he falls for, and who loves him back for little discernible reason, the stick-up-the-ass by-the-rules enforcer, etc. The narrative very rarely opts for a character that confounds expectations, and often engineers some pretty unlikely outcomes between its cast, such as two very different, rival characters settling their difference in the course of an off-screen walk up some stairs.

Despite all this, the story hums along quickly and I found myself enjoying it, if occasionally skipping over the more dull exposition-y bits or Griffin-Mars’s annoying flashbacks to the people he has lost/abandoned throughout his career. Some of the tech is cool- Chronmen are armed with a force shield/projector called an ‘exo’, that they can use to create weaponized force-tentacles of a strength that can crush a spaceship, and Chu smashes out the battle scenes, constantly putting Griffin-Mars on the edge of death as he cuts through enemies, falling buildings, crashing ships, and sundry other explosion-y scenarios.

“Finish your fucking job and you won’t have to tolerate this much longer, Levin.”

That being said, the book has plenty of f-bombs, sex, video-game plot and half baked premises. I could barely finish it.