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A review by the_scribbling_man
Time and Again by Clifford D. Simak
4.0
High 3.
"Sutton sensed resurrection and he fought against it, for death was so comfortable. Like a soft, warm bed. And resurrection was a strident, insistent, maddening alarm clock that shrilled across the predawn chill of a dreadful, frowzy room. Dreadful with its life and its bare reality and its sharp, sickening reminder that one must get up and walk into reality again."
The first third/maybe half of this is pretty much as close as Simak gets to writing a thriller. The ideas are big, but the pacing is relatively snappy (you know, for Simak), and the whole set up feels very PKD. Then in the latter half, Simak goes full Simak and enters into classic rural, contemplative, pastoral Sci fi - and by that I mean the main character quite literally gets stuck in 1970's Wisconsin for 10 years, spending his days fishing, farming, rambling, writing, and discussing the arrogance of man with our antagonist.
On one level, Time and Again is super messy, and possibly one of Simak's least satisfying novels; on the other hand, it can be very satisfying... It's packed with ideas, it has some of his finest prose and it wraps things up much more neatly than many of his other outings. It's probably a bit too big for its boots, touching on concepts it doesn't really know how to explore; but the attempt to explore these themes is still pretty interesting, even if the whole destiny angle is little more than a vague Mcguffin.
Still, Time and Again is pretty readable, pretty fun at points and (as with many Simak stories) just plain pretty. It's charming in its quaint ambition, and difficult not to admire.
A delightful tale, if inconsistent. Probably not a stretch to call it one of his best (take that how you will).
And that ending... Considerably more brutal than I remember it being.
"Sutton sensed resurrection and he fought against it, for death was so comfortable. Like a soft, warm bed. And resurrection was a strident, insistent, maddening alarm clock that shrilled across the predawn chill of a dreadful, frowzy room. Dreadful with its life and its bare reality and its sharp, sickening reminder that one must get up and walk into reality again."
The first third/maybe half of this is pretty much as close as Simak gets to writing a thriller. The ideas are big, but the pacing is relatively snappy (you know, for Simak), and the whole set up feels very PKD. Then in the latter half, Simak goes full Simak and enters into classic rural, contemplative, pastoral Sci fi - and by that I mean the main character quite literally gets stuck in 1970's Wisconsin for 10 years, spending his days fishing, farming, rambling, writing, and discussing the arrogance of man with our antagonist.
On one level, Time and Again is super messy, and possibly one of Simak's least satisfying novels; on the other hand, it can be very satisfying... It's packed with ideas, it has some of his finest prose and it wraps things up much more neatly than many of his other outings. It's probably a bit too big for its boots, touching on concepts it doesn't really know how to explore; but the attempt to explore these themes is still pretty interesting, even if the whole destiny angle is little more than a vague Mcguffin.
Still, Time and Again is pretty readable, pretty fun at points and (as with many Simak stories) just plain pretty. It's charming in its quaint ambition, and difficult not to admire.
A delightful tale, if inconsistent. Probably not a stretch to call it one of his best (take that how you will).
And that ending... Considerably more brutal than I remember it being.