Wow.This story was so multi-layered, I shake my head in utter amazement that it was written in 1951. If the author were still alive, I'd put it on my dream list to shake his hand and thank him for his talent with words. It's no wonder he won so many awards in his career.This is a book of philosophy about the meaning of destiny hidden in the guise of Science Fiction. Amidst the requisite time travel theme, it touches on the nature of mankind with its illusion of superiority over all living things...

I love Simak. Whenever I'm in the mood for some old-time SF that can still be read with joy today, lacking the most pernicious queasy qualities of the time-period in which popular fiction thrived back then, I always turn to Simak. He never lets me down. It's just plain fun.This book is no different. It's a time-travel paradox story on the fringes, but at its heart, it's all about Destiny. A guy tries to see what he can see with some strange aliens, comes back missing 20 years and a mysterious gr...

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 believ...

3.5 stars

I liked this one. I liked the idea of “well this happened when this person traveled through time, so now I must also make it happen.” It’s sound logic. I felt there were some things that were not as well explained as I would have liked, but I got the gist of the story but I could see some people finding it difficult because of how many times there are things that are alluded to, but never really fleshed out.

The Measure of Man.It’s about destiny, androids, a book which caused a war, time-travel, the place of man in the universe. But also down to earth musings about nature and the beauty of just being content. There is much to enjoy in the book.Asher Sutton returns from a mission he should not have succeeded in and should not have come back from. But he did. And once back on earth he’s not the same anymore, or is he?It’s mysterious. Although, we readers have an inkling what is going on. Slowly Sutton...

While the first few chapters had the makings of a really good time-travel book, it just seemed to bog down later on - to the point where I simply skipped over some of the paragraphs. Most of the time travel in the book are just references to things which will happen in the future for example, the text of a book, not yet written, found in the burnt-out wreckage of a space-craft....The book had so much promise but just didn't deliver.

I discovered Clifford Simak nearly 35 years ago. I was a young mother, and his tales of robots and dogs genetically engineered to talk were balm to my soul. Maybe man would disappear someday in the future, but something would continue. Thank goodness I didn't read "Time and Again" back then. This is a very disturbing book about what it means to be human, destiny as a concept and Manifest Destiny. If we isolate what ever it is that makes us human is it worth preserving the human race, or is that

Although this book had a somewhat confusing construction (the world where it is set uses time travel on a regular basis, so that was only to be expected), it's a satisfying read, with simple themes that are reasonably well developed. The main characters are on a quest to give androids and humans equal rights, and several factions fight to get hold of the hero; on the whole, the novel doesn't really have time to give every character, group or nation the depth of construction they might deserve, a...

One I read repeatedly as a young person. I loved it.

A true sci-fi classic winner! Time and Again opens in a distant future on earth that includes androids, robots, interactive television, weather control, mentophones - an ingenious device that allows instantaneous interstellar communication, dramatically extended life spans, travel to distant star systems and a humanity that has conquered the galaxy and spread its seed far and wide. After a 20 year absence, Asher Sutton returns to earth from an expedition to 61 Cygni, a system that until now has

I wanted to like this a lot more than I did, but it wasn't the sort of book I thought it would be.The title and blurb imply that this is primarily a time travel adventure. It is not. True, there is some time travel and some adventure, but mainly this is a philosophical musing upon the nature of religious sects. The main character is perhaps most akin to the Buddha, in that he writes a book that describes a worldview and becomes quite influential. In fact, it is so important a text that a group o...

Oh dear, this book is a bit of a mess. It's about time travel....no, it's about androids and Asimovian space cops... No, it's about biology and symbiotic life forms...no, it's about time travel again...no, it's a scathing critique of manifest destiny...no, it's about a war between androids and humanity...no, it's about mutant humans with special powers...no, I'm not sure what it's about.

What would you think if you found an old book signed with your name-and learned that it bore a date in the distant future? It happens to Asher Sutton, and upon setting out to investigate the incredible enigma, he finds that book a ticket to a galactic empire many thousands of years from now!Definitely my favourite time-travel novel so far!

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 inabili...

I read an Open Road Media re-publication of this 1951 novel in kindle format because there was a short-term deep price cut for it on Amazon, and I have always liked Clifford Simak’s work. It is sad now to give this as low a rating as I have. I highly recommend his best novels – Way Station and City.The problem with the book is that there are two plots. The novel first has Ash Sutton who has returned from a twenty-year first-contact mission to 61 Cygni. He died there, and was brought back to life...

So, its Clifford D. Simak's birthday today. Only a happy coincidence that I finished this novel today. I have been reading it for a few weeks. I got stuck at page 90. Because the novel starts OK, gets ridiculously awful - disjointed, confusing, and random - and then suddenly most of it straightens out and things make sense. The ending continues on too long and gets a little out of hand, honestly. But I thought I was going to have to abandon this novel around page 100. And I VERY RARELY abandon a...

Asher Sutton returned from a dangerous space mission clutching a book about destiny which he has written. Except he hasn't written it yet. And maybe he never will.A very clever concept from Simak, which twists our understanding of the predestination paradox in an engaging way.

As I think I may have mentioned elsewhere, stories about time travel can sometimes give me a headache right between the eyes. And really, who among us hasn't, at one time or another, come close to getting a major-league migraine when trying to suss out the temporal conundrums inherent in many of these tales? Fortunately for me--and my head--the novel that I have just experienced is one that does indeed feature time travel in its story line, but that lays out its complexities in a manner that lea...

A weird and absolutely wonderful story. Just like one of the main themes of this story, we jump straight into the future with bot servant AIs, mentophones, teleporters and extrasolar colonisation all displayed and discussed within the first two or three chapters. We also learn very early that there's something up with Sutton, something is definitely NQR, Not Quite Right with him but equally from his perspective something is also NQR at home on Earth. Humanity is presented at once as both familia...