Asher Sutton returns to Earth from a solo expedition to 61 Cygni twenty years later on a starship that was so seriously damaged that it would have been impossible for him to have made the journey and still be alive. As soon as he reports in and arrives home, he’s drugged, and brain scanned. Besides his own government agency there are at least three or four groups working against him. He becomes coerced, shot at, kidnapped, and chased because of a powerfully influential book that he hasn’t written yet. He’s the center of attention in an interstellar guerilla war that’s executed in both space and time: the present time, the past, and the future.

Many of the themes Simak revisits in his later work appear in this tale first published in 1950: time travel, the afterlife, the nature of humanity, longevity, human extra-terrestrial alien contact, and how will we respond to new artificial sentient beings like robots and chemically grown android servants, and how will they in turn, responds to us? It’s a wild ride filled with beings with their own ideas about these concerns, several of which humanity is about to come to grips with in the 21st century for the first time. ( )

I will always read any Simak book I find. That said I wanted it to be better then it is. Pretty good for an early novel but not great. ( )

Reread this only last year, but here I am, reading Time and Again... again. I lent it to a friend and just happened to have another copy to hand, so I decided to refresh my memory.

Similar thoughts to last time I think, only I enjoyed it more. It does fumble a bit towards the end, but the ending itself is killer.

Prior review (June 2020) below.

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High 3.

"Sutton sensed resurrection and he fought against it, for death was so comfortable. Like a soft, warm bed. And resurrection was a strident, insistent, maddening alarm clock that shrilled across the predawn chill of a dreadful, frowzy room. Dreadful with its life and its bare reality and its sharp, sickening reminder that one must get up and walk into reality again."


The first third/maybe half of this is pretty much as close as Simak gets to writing a thriller. The ideas are big, but the pacing is relatively snappy (you know, for Simak), and the whole set up feels very PKD. Then in the latter half, Simak goes full Simak and enters into classic rural, contemplative, pastoral Sci fi - and by that I mean the main character quite literally gets stuck in 1970's Wisconsin for 10 years, spending his days fishing, farming, rambling, writing, and discussing the arrogance of man with our antagonist.

On one level, Time and Again is super messy, and possibly one of Simak's least satisfying novels; on the other hand, it can be very satisfying... It's packed with ideas, it has some of his finest prose and it wraps things up much more neatly than many of his other outings. It's probably a bit too big for its boots, touching on concepts it doesn't really know how to explore; but the attempt to explore these themes is still pretty interesting, even if the whole destiny angle is little more than a vague Mcguffin.

Still, Time and Again is pretty readable, pretty fun at points and (as with many Simak stories) just plain pretty. It's charming in its quaint ambition, and difficult not to admire.

A delightful tale, if inconsistent. Probably not a stretch to call it one of his best (take that how you will).

And that ending... Considerably more brutal than I remember it being. ( )

Not bad for 1951. The narration style felt like a Twilight Zone voiceover — lofty, grand pronouncements with a touch of mystery. Surprisingly not too sexist for the time. ( )

Not bad for 1951. The narration style felt like a Twilight Zone voiceover — lofty, grand pronouncements with a touch of mystery. Surprisingly not too sexist for the time. ( )