Book review: Time and Again

Wiki has a garbled summary but in truth the book is only semi-coherent. This gushing Goodreads review is a better shot at describing the book. My excuse for buying this¹, despite having just read A Heritage of Stars, is the same as that: undemanding afternoon reading in the garden. This it provided. Although having said that, towards the end it is almost thought-provoking.

As with AHOS, a number of improbable coincidences need to be ignored and I shall. Also I think we never quite learn who tipped off the authorities that Our Hero was returning. There is a good deal of pastorality in this too: Our Hero spends ten years working on a farm, for example. Indeed, I think Simak would have been happier, and would probably have written better books, if he had dispensed with the sci-fi aspects entirely.

A brief plot summary: we begin with Our Hero returning from 61 Cygni, a planet only he of all men has ever been able to reach. He has been missing for twenty years and indeed, seems in some senses to have been dead; his contacts with the Cygnets have affected him. When he returns he is of some importance and people want to kill him, because he is going to write a book about Destiny with a capital D. This will help unite humanity, or cause a war, or something. Things are delicate, because people have spread out through the galaxy and are In Charge, though spread very thin. There are Androids, who are human like in all respects except they cannot reproduce. Because of this, they are subservient to humans; essentially, slaves.

You might expect extensive discussion of "well if the Androids are like humans, can think and feel and reason, how do we morally justify their slavery merely because they can't breed? After all, we don't treat non-fertile humans as slaves". But this never comes up. The Androids definitely aspire to better but somehow acknowledge, weirdly, that for the moment their inferiority and serfdom is justified. There's also the awkwardneess of humans having taken over the galaxy - therefore, presumably, either enslaving or ruling loadsa aliens - but with again no thoughts of "errm, is this justified?" Instead, the book worries more about whether we can stay on top (the galaxy-wide takeover also seems totally implausible but remember I'm trying to avoid mentioning suchlike, I'd be here all night otherwise). Instead, we get rather muddled musings, and discussions, and how Our Hero's book on Destiny might somehow encourage or enable the Androids to seize control of their own destiny, or something. There's time travel mixed in², so we gets lots of Our Hero needing to actually write his book, half knowing what will be in it, and the Bad People want to stop him writing the book; or bowdlerise it. What's never discussed is why it is so necessary that he write the thing; if the ideas are good, and known, anyone could; yet the story treats it as though he were a prophet and the book a holy tract.

Oh, and it slowly becomes clear that Simak is a bit of a good-old-dayes sort of guy, unconvinced by the virtues of progress. This is all too easy to wallow in.

Refs

* I wrote much the same at Goodreads.

Notes

1. Also from Oxfam. Someone has dumped a cache of old Simak stuff.

2. With all the usual inevitable insoluble problems this causes; Simak does not hesitate to use all the std.tropes that he correctly assumes we'll be familiar with; like, you can't go back and change things that are written down, or only a bit. I hate that stuff.