Clifford Simak

Time And Again

Ace Books, 1951    [SF, Eng, I3]

–––––––––––––––––––––––

When Asher Sutton returned to Earth, he discovered that beings from the future had made preparations for him: some would help him, some would try to own him, and some would see him dead. And all because of a book that he had not yet written, a book that the killers would rather were never written.

Follow Asher Sutton across all of space and time in his desperate run for life.

–––––––––––––––––––––––

“The man came out of the twilight when the greenish yellow of the sun’s last light still lingered in the west. He paused at the edge of the patio and called.”

The story begins this way, very simply: a man from the future has come to warn that an explorer is coming back to Earth, in spite of having died when his starship crashed on a far planet twenty years earlier. And since the explorer plans writing a book, he is to be stopped because the book would spread a message of full equality among all living creatures, androids and robots, and men can’t afford that anything may threat their supremacy in the universe. The fight stretches out through time and space, but in the end the explorer can’t be defeated, because the message he is spreading is one of destiny.

Simak is a deep-routed writer, and his message that living beings are never alone is a recurring theme. Here, it has one of its most fascinating courses.