Whenever I read Clifford D. Simak’s books (such as City, Mastodonia, or Project Pope), I think they’re…. interesting. But not compelling, which is why they are spaced so far apart in the archives (2010, 2017, 2020, and now 2025). They all feature great sweeps of time or time-travel or distant futures and big questions and although the characters are not bad, they’re do not make for heroes or compelling reading.
At any rate, in this book, a spacefarer who has been missing after going to an isolated and potentially dangerous planet returns after twenty years, but before he does, an unknown person or entity approaches an agent of Earth’s security forces to explain that they should kill Sutton, the traveler. The unknown person is from the future, and he wants to make sure that Sutton does not write a book. Because Sutton, who died in a crash on the planet but was revitalized by the aliens there and put in touch with the entity paired to him, his Destiny, which all living things have. And Sutton will write his reflections in a book which will become a religious text at the core of a inter-time war between a faction that wants Man to be the supremest being in the galaxy and to conquer and rule through a corporation that lasts a million years and one that wants to recognize the dignity of all life, particularly androids, which are not robots but rather are humans who are built organically but are sterile.
So that’s the setup, but it’s not the setup–it’s the story as it is revealed two and experienced by Sutton, the main character, who is approached by both factions and others and struggles with his Destiny–well, not the entity he calls Johnny, but he tries to wrap his head around how it’s all going to come to pass, whether he’s in real danger since he has not yet written the book, and discovering the non-human abilities he has been given by the aliens–including the ability to die and to then revive from the power received from twinkling stars–or a ship’s engine.
So it’s a lot of hopscotching and cogitating on the questions about destiny and the paradoxes of time travel, but events just seem to happen to Sutton, and although he’s a sympathetic character, a stranger both to the future where the factions are sending him back in time and to the past (1981, which is 30 years after the book was written, so the future from the book’s present but closer to the book’s publication date than to today), the alien abilities which are revealed as the book progresses makes him a bit of a Mary Sue, and the ending indicates how one faction has successfully nudged Sutton to fulfilling his destiny. So it smacks a bit of nudge and behavioral economics which I find unpalatable.
So I might have a couple of more Simaks lying around, but it is likely to be another half-decade or more until I get to it if I find it.
I do think I have a copy of Time and Again by Jack Finney around here somewhere, a 1970 book with the same title which also involves time travel. Maybe I’ll pick that up sometime soon (when I find it) just because it would seem to be just the right time to do so.
