My proposal reads Brenda Peynado’s 2024 Time’s Agent as diasporic Latin American speculative cli-fi that reimagines colonial history, ecological crisis, and planetary globalgothic futurity. I argue that the novel transforms terra nullius from a legal fiction of “empty land” into a techno-cosmological non-mimetic messianic speculative healing force. This is a worldview that renders land, Indigenous ancestrality, and other-than-human relations as agents of non-mimetic catharsis. Against this colonial ontology of absence, Peynado develops a post-mimetic response to what I call “terra nullius blues,” an affective and formal haunting produced by the desire to recover erased histories from within a damaged planetary present.

In Peynado’s novel, the protagonist, Agent Petra, dreams of discovering living Taínos preserved in “pocket worlds” beyond colonial erasure. The cosmological ancestral manifestation of Taínos here is not simply safeguarded in the colonial past as a tragically recoverable lost ancestrality. As globalgothic ancestors, I show, they are possible techno-cosmological contemporaries, even future inhabitants, of Petra’s own lifeworld. When Petra’s young daughter imagines traveling to the past to meet dinosaurs or to the future to meet aliens, Petra stops herself from explaining that “time had so far only gone forward,” and that “once you’ve gone forward you can never go back.” This moment crystallizes the novel’s spiral temporal paradox of non-mimetic healing: the past cannot be restored through return, but techno-cosmologies may still be negotiated as messianic healing through speculative ancestral non-mimetic catharsis.

That paradox finds its prosopopeia in RoFido, a robotic dog that contains a memory backup of Petra’s daughter. RoFido’s hybrid form as an animal, machine, companion, and human memory archive is a cathartic techno-ancestral cosmological mode of globalgothic haunting in which a hauntings appear not as specters but as artificial memory, archival incompletion, climate precarity, and the persistence of colonial time in non-mimetic futurity. Petra’s repeated resetting of her daughter’s memory becomes a negotiation with the ethics of globalgothic speculative catharsis for techno-ancestral cosmologies, as robotic cosmologies come to be reanimated without reproducing the extractive archival logics that first rendered them lost.

I contend that Peynado’s speculative form generates a poetics of spiral time through this non-mimetic negotiation, which, in turn, unsettles universalizing accounts of the Anthropocene and reframes planetary futurity through cosmic (un)colonial cartography of techno-ancestrality, Indigenous survival, diasporic memory, and more-than-human kinship.