Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988)

Asher Sutton returns to Earth from a solo expedition to 61 Cygni twenty years later on a starship that was so seriously damaged that it would have been impossible for him to have made the journey and still be alive. As soon as he reports in and arrives home, he’s drugged, and brain scanned. Besides his own government agency there are at least three or four groups working against him. He becomes coerced, shot at, kidnapped, and chased because of a powerfully influential book that he hasn’t written yet. He’s the center of attention in an interstellar guerilla war that’s executed in both space and time: the present time, the past, and the future.

Many of the themes Simak revisits in his later work appear in this tale first published in 1950: time travel, the afterlife, the nature of humanity, longevity, human extra-terrestrial alien contact, and how will we respond to new artificial sentient beings like robots and chemically grown android servants, and how will they in turn, responds to us? It’s a wild ride filled with beings with their own ideas about these concerns, several of which humanity is about to come to grips with in the 21st century for the first time.… (mer)