Time and Again

This book has two themes run together, one of which works better than the other.

The first theme is about Asher Sutton and what he found on the seventh planet of 61 Cygni. This is classic, magnificent sense-of-wonder sf, told in Simak's unhurried, thoughtful prose.

The second theme is about the world Sutton came from: a far-future society of humans and their android servants, treated as inferiors although they're the same in almost every respect as humans made in the traditional way.

I don't believe in this future society, so for me the book's second theme seems to agonize pointlessly over a non-issue. The Android Problem was a preoccupation of sf writers around the middle of the twentieth century, but I think it's been out of fashion for decades by now, and it has the quaintness you sometimes find when writers in the past imagine the future and get it wrong.

However, thinking about it more deeply, the story of Asher Sutton is about whether or not you make a fundamental distinction between humans and other sentient beings; and androids are merely an example of other sentient beings. Thus, if you see the presence of androids in the story as a flaw, it's really a superficial rather than a fundamental flaw.

Simak seems to have been a man who worried about the human condition, about how we can come to terms with life and live at peace with the world. However, his writing style is slow, calming, and reassuring, even when he wrote of the strange and the new, and even when he wrote of action and violence. Although he wrote about the future, he liked to balance the strange and the new with the old and familiar; and his instinct was to retreat into the countryside for comfort, into a rural world that changes less than the city.