Kim Miller
I think this book jumps into my #1 spot for time travel stories.
Asher Sutton lives in a far future, 8,000 years off. The book opens with someone struggling to land a damaged space ship, we don't find out until later that it's Asher. Neither do we find out what has happened to him until later.
A few days before this another man sits on his front porch looking out into the evening. A stranger appears, tells him that Sutton is coming back, and he must be killed. As the story progresses we find out that the stranger is from the future, and is the porch man's successor in his job of some sort of Galactic cop.
The book follows several time traveling actors, each one set on either protecting Sutton or killing him. We find that he's had a life=changing experience on another planet, he's been gone for twenty years, and on his return he's written a book of philosophy that has changed the course of human history over the millennia. A war has broken out between or 'originalists' and the 'revisionists', those who are committed to Sutton's original thought and those who have narrowed and footnoted his work to give themselves an advantage. The visiting stranger wants Sutton killed before he has a chance to write his book.
Sutton slowly comes to understand his place in the future and tries to protect his work. Simak gives us a deep dive into what it takes to change a future, and how to be the last man standing when people can travel back to preempt the efforts of the opposition. Considering the book was published in 1951, Simak's thinking is deep and wide ranging. Chapters swing between time settings as he builds a complex story of people going back and forth in time to leave clues or to prevent an unexpected event from messing everything up.
Also of interest is how the future seemed to a 1951 author. 8,000 years into the future people still have ink wells on the desk, alongside a 'Visor', an iPad sounding device for video calls. There is also the anomaly whereby Sutton hides a time travel ship at the bottom of a river in 1977, only to find the strong currents have covered it with sand when he tries to get away and back to his own time. It's still there, waiting for somebody to find it.
I think this book jumps into my #1 spot for time travel stories.
Asher Sutton lives in a far future, 8,000 years off. The book opens with someone struggling to land a damaged space ship, we don't find out until later that it's Asher. Neither do we find out what has happened to him until later.
A few days before this another man sits on his front porch looking out into the evening. A stranger appears, tells him that Sutton is coming back, and he must be killed. As the story progresses we find out that the stranger is from the future, and is the porch man's successor in his job of some sort of Galactic cop.
The book follows several time traveling actors, each one set on either protecting Sutton or killing him. We find that he's had a life=changing experience on another planet, he's been gone for twenty years, and on his return he's written a book of philosophy that has changed the course of human history over the millennia. A war has broken out between or 'originalists' and the 'revisionists', those who are committed to Sutton's original thought and those who have narrowed and footnoted his work to give themselves an advantage. The visiting stranger wants Sutton killed before he has a chance to write his book.
Sutton slowly comes to understand his place in the future and tries to protect his work. Simak gives us a deep dive into what it takes to change a future, and how to be the last man standing when people can travel back to preempt the efforts of the opposition. Considering the book was published in 1951, Simak's thinking is deep and wide ranging. Chapters swing between time settings as he builds a complex story of people going back and forth in time to leave clues or to prevent an unexpected event from messing everything up.
Also of interest is how the future seemed to a 1951 author. 8,000 years into the future people still have ink wells on the desk, alongside a 'Visor', an iPad sounding device for video calls. There is also the anomaly whereby Sutton hides a time travel ship at the bottom of a river in 1977, only to find the strong currents have covered it with sand when he tries to get away and back to his own time. It's still there, waiting for somebody to find it.