Sunday, May 23, 2021

Time and Again, by Clifford D. Simak

Open Road Media, December 2015 (original publication December 1950)

Twenty years ago, Asher Sutton disappeared in the star system 61 Cygni, a system that the otherwise galaxy-conquering humans have failed to penetrate. Now he's back, in a ship with catastrophic damage he shouldn't have survived.

Yet he's alive, uninjured, healthy--and changed. Perhaps not entirely human, anymore. And, though it's not obvious, he's not alone.

Asher Sutton also has a message--for humans, for androids who are no different from humans except for numbers on their foreheads, the inability to reproduce biologically, and being property, and for the rest of the living beings in the human-dominated galaxy.

It's a message that will change the galaxy.

It's a message that some want to suppress, some want to hijack, and some want to help him spread.

Asher arrives home to find time travel has been invented, and a war is already raging in time over who will control his message.

Androids, a human, a few robots, will help him. Other humans want to kill him, to stop his message altogether. Still other humans want to control his message, not suppress it, but modify it to suit their purpose of continuing and spreading human domination.

Asher will discover a message from the past, go traveling in time, and will start to discover that he has returned from 61 Cygni with new abilities he did not suspect--and which need time and practice to use effectively. The question is, can he master them in time to survive and spread his message?

This is an enjoyable, exciting, thoughtful story, from one of the best sf writers of the mid-20th century, one of my favorites. Highly recommended.

I bought this book.

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