Time and Again
Ratings14
Average rating3.5
It is the future and Mankind has spread to the stars like seeds before the wind. One star system, though, shrouded in mystery, has defied Man's every attempt to visit it. Every expedition to 61 Cygni has found its path inexplicably deflected and has been forced to return home in frustration. In desperation, special agent Asher Sutton was sent on a solo mission, but unlike the others he did not return and 61 Cygni was quietly forgotten.
As the book begins, twenty years have passed and, against all odds, Asher Sutton has returned. The mystery only deepens when it is discovered that Asher's ship was damaged many years ago in a crash that left it completely disabled and ought to have killed its sole passenger. The conclusion becomes inescapable; Asher Sutton died but now he's back. As the story develops, we discover Asher is not alone and it's not clear that he's even entirely human. But most importantly, Asher returns bearing an idea that will shake Mankind's beliefs to their foundations.
In Time and Again, Mankind is spread thin across the stars and to help hold the frontier he has created biological androids. Created in the lab by chemical means, androids are sterile and cannot reproduce but in all other respects are as human as their creators. None the less, androids are treated as property and bear a mark on their foreheads to distinguish them from "true" humans.
Androids dream of one day being acknowledged and treated as the equals of the "humans" and Asher's idea is the key for which they have been searching. Asher soon becomes the center of a struggle between three groups; humans of the present who fear any new idea that might loosen Mankind's tenuous grip on the stars, humans of the future who, via time travel, are waging a quiet war to alter the past to maintain the current status quo, and the androids of the future who struggle to let Asher's idea be born.
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Not my favorite Clifford Simak tale, but still intriguing with Simak's usual deftness of writing.
This book has two themes run together, one of which works better than the other.
The first theme is about Asher Sutton and what he found on the seventh planet of 61 Cygni. This is classic, magnificent sense-of-wonder sf, told in Simak's unhurried, thoughtful prose.
The second theme is about the world Sutton came from: a far-future society of humans and their android servants, treated as inferiors although they're the same in almost every respect as humans made in the traditional way.
I don't believe in this future society, so for me the book's second theme seems to agonize pointlessly over a non-issue. The Android Problem was a preoccupation of sf writers around the middle of the twentieth century, but I think it's been out of fashion for decades by now, and it has the quaintness you sometimes find when writers in the past imagine the future and get it wrong.
However, thinking about it more deeply, the story of Asher Sutton is about whether or not you make a fundamental distinction between humans and other sentient beings; and androids are merely an example of other sentient beings. Thus, if you see the presence of androids in the story as a flaw, it's really a superficial rather than a fundamental flaw.
Simak seems to have been a man who worried about the human condition, about how we can come to terms with life and live at peace with the world. However, his writing style is slow, calming, and reassuring, even when he wrote of the strange and the new, and even when he wrote of action and violence. Although he wrote about the future, he liked to balance the strange and the new with the old and familiar; and his instinct was to retreat into the countryside for comfort, into a rural world that changes less than the city.
