The next stop in my time travel marathon (November being Science Fiction Month) and by far the best yet is Time and Again, a little known but much loved 1970 novel by Jack Finney that handles a fantastic premise -- a government project sends a man eighty-eight years into New York City's past -- with more imagination, sensuality and logic than any time travel story I've read. This is a wonderful book that has just become one of my favorites.Simon Morley, known as "Si", is twenty-eight years old, an art student from Buffalo who works as a graphic designer for an advertising firm on 54th Street. Si is a man out of time; he met his girlfriend Kate Mancusco at the antique shop she owns on Third Avenue, where Si enjoys digging through stereoscopeic slides from New York City of yesteryear. Then one Friday, watching the clock edge toward lunch, Si receives a visitor. Ruben Prien is a project manager for a U.S. government program he revaeals very little about except to promise Si that he envies his opportunity to be offered an adventure as great as this.Si is invited to participate in some tests first and arriving for his interview in a complex disguised as a moving company warehouse on the Upper West Side, is shown many strange things. There are instruction rooms, one with a student speaking medieval French, one with a man in a World War I uniform training in bayonet combat, one with a woman learning the Charleston. Si is led onto a catwalk above a massive soundstage, where several sets have been built, from a neighborhood in the 1920s to a Montana plain with Crow Indian teepees. Si is finally taken to the employee cafeteria, where he's introduced the the project director, a theoretical physicist named Dr. Danziger.The old man asks Si how much he knows about Albert Einstein. Not much, Si replies, except that Einstein had bushy hair and was terrible at arithmetic. Danziger elaborates, "He meant that we're mistaken in our conception of what the past, present and future really are. We think the past is gone, the future hasn't yet happened, and that only the present exists. Because the present is all we can see." In other words, the past isn't gone. It exists and can be reached.Danziger's candidates, those with the ability to see things both as they are and how they could have been, are trained in techniques of self-hypnosis, and after rehearsing on a soundstage, are placed in certain environments -- a town in rural Vermont, a plain in Montana -- that have gone unchanged between now and some point in the past. Danziger has discovered a way to make time travel possible, just as Einstein theorized. Why? To prove it can be done.Si is offered the opportunity to travel to San Francisco in 1901, but the artist has another destination in mind: New York City, January 1882, where he wants to watch a man mail a letter at the Main Post Office. Si's girlfriend had a foster father who went through life unable to solve a mystery surrounding the suicide of his father Andrew Carmody, a financier who was an adviser of some sort to President Cleveland. The source of whatever misery Carmody was enduring had to do with that mysterious post, which was partially burned by his wife along with a suicide note that read "That the sending of this should cause the Destruction by Fire of the Entire World ..."His mission disclosed to Kate, Si's girlfriend helps him study up on the history of New York City of the 1880s. The project rents him an apartment in the Dakota Building, one of the few available buildings in Manhattan that was standing in 1882. Over a period of several days, dressed in period garb, Si attempts to train his mind that the world outside his window is 1882. After many failed attempts and one false start, Si is visited by Kate, and the couple makes the attempt together. I've summarized 115 pages of Time and Again and would prefer to leave as much of the ensuing 285 pages a surprise as I can. One of the things that Finney does here that so many writers ignore is to stop and consider how traumatic the experience of time travel would be. It comes as an existential crisis, making travelers physically ill from the realization that they're now history, surrounded by people who were all dead a minute ago. The experience is not treated flippantly or as a plot point but given a gravitas that I see rarely in science fiction.As time travel speculation, Finney couldn't have chosen more elegant mechanisms than Einstein, the Dakota Building and self-hypnosis. Logically, it all makes sense. New York City of 1882 isn't a travel destination I'd have chosen, but Finney took history I'd never known and brought it to life: -- A New York City covered by trees and farms (the Dakota Building has been built so far out in the sticks that's how it earned the name "the Dakotas").-- Floors covered in tobacco juice, with spittoons as hit or miss as modern day men's urinals. -- Men gathering at the Western Union building on Broadway to set their pocket watches to noon as a red ball drops the length of a flagpole on the roof.-- The arm of the Statue of Liberty a landmark before the full statue could be erected on Ellis Island. -- Elevated trains pulled by small locomotives.-- Orphaned and homeless boys sleeping on hay barges in winter.As a native Texan who's never seen a real winter, I was particularly amazed by how vividly Finney utilizes snow, ice and freezing cold to advance his story, particularly Si and Kate's dramatic arrival in 1882 during blizzard conditions that obscure all indications of the present until the sound of a horse drawn sleigh announces their arrival in the past.The big ticket action sequence in the novel develops naturally from the characters and builds ferociously in a way it only could in the place and time of Finney's story. At no point in the action did I feel that Finney was taking 20th century plot devices and running his time travelers through them; the workings of New York City in 1882 seems to inform every decision. There were moments where I thought I was ahead of his story and knew exactly where Finney was leading me, possibly toward the paradoxes Ray Bradbury speculated about, maybe a twist ending reminiscent of The Twilight Zone, and in each instance, I was wrong. The triumph of the book is how well Finney takes modern day technology and marries it with the romance of the past. As endings go, Finney's ranks as one of most satisfying I've ever read. Time and Again is a novel that has worked its spell on enough players in Hollywood to be in perpetual development as a movie. Paul Newman & Joanne Woodward fancied making a film version in the 1970s before Newman passed the book to Robert Redford, who failed in his attempts to interest Sydney Pollack, George Roy Hill or Steven Spielberg and got close to directing it himself in the 1990s. The novel would make a great big screen fantasy romance, with any number of young actors able to fit into the lead roles.
If Simon Morley, protagonist of Finney's Time and Again, had any real personality beyond his nickname being "Si," perhaps the book's loose ends and rough edges would have distracted less. But he is neither a complex and interesting original nor a heavy-handed archetype. He's more of a blank slate onto which we might project ourselves, the first-person writing tone that of an amateur blogger who is trying his hand at a journalistic account of a very exciting place. No matter the topic, if the writing is boring so must be the reading.Here, plot must take the place of character but, unfortunately, it has many weaknesses, and often what strength it appears to have is mere fluff: the author's showing off of his in-depth research on the 1880's.There is beauty in the idea of simplicity and novelty as the route to time-travel, but Finney's simplicity is just that: it falls short. The idea is that with enough study on a time and place, a person can mentally transport themselves to this other time. This is put forth as a government project, and Finney attempts an exploration of the human motivation to use knowledge that shouldn't be used, to negative ends.So many obvious questions pop up, left unanswered, that the ridiculousness gets in the way of the story. It comes off as badly thought-out and amateurish. How does a time-traveler come equipped with money? How does he will himself to a specific day? How does time pass in the present while one is in the past? Why isn't the government asking these questions? Why isn't the government watching more carefully? Why is it so easy for random people to be able to do this when apparently it's so hard for others who spend ages studying and have huge amounts of government money spent on them?It's all very sloppy. Luckily there was another storyline of some mystery and suspense that kept things moving.[minor spoiler:]The romance, however, did not convince or engage. It's hard to fall in love with characters that do not have much character to them, and harder still to care whether they fall for each other. I think the breaking point for me was when Morely decides to interfere in his love interest's life upon the epiphany that the people of the 1880's are just as human and worthy as those of his time. He realizes this after spending time with an impoverished man who works 14-hour days freezing his ass off for $1.50/day so his children won't join the thousands of orphans around the city. So Morely decides that these are real people, and his action against their real pain is to... save his crush from a bad marriage.The morality of this story seemed as confused and vague as the character, actually, and it gets quite full of it at the end.If I hadn't come to this book with high expectations, I might have been more accepting of the mildly diverting mystery storyline, but I think I would have been less forgiving of the onanistic travel book descriptions of buildings and carriages, and verbatim quotes from newspapers of the time.
What do You think about Time And Again (2012)?
Previously read May 2007 Perhaps one of my favorite time travel novels, I picked up my copy of Time and Again for a re-read earlier this week .Si Morley, an advertising illustrator who is living in New York & feeling somewhat unfulfilled in life, is approached by a mysterious man who asks him to commit to a secret project. Not having much else to look forward to (even his relationship is somewhat desultory), he agrees. The project, under the aegis of the US government, is time travel by means of self-hypnotism & surrounding one's self with the artifacts of that time. A mystery in the life of his girlfriend's adoptive parents gives him the impetus to travel to the New York of 1882.The puzzle pieces that Finney puts together in this novel are amazing, with actual historical events fitting in almost seamlessly to the narrative, including sketches and photographs from the time. The unraveling of the mystery and the thrilling climax were as compelling on a re-read as the first time. As before, I found myself wondering just how much of the story was true. Finney does admit to changing some of the facts - the Dakota hotel (where Si does his "traveling") wasn't complete until 1885, for example. But other elements appear to be faithfully researched.I'd recommend this novel to fans of time travel who also have an interest in the world of the turn of the 19th century.-------------Thoughts after my Jan 2015 reread: The more I think about it, this is really historical fiction with a thin SF wrapper. The 1882 portion of the story is still as gripping as the first time I read it, and holds up very well - not only the world building, but the plot and characters; however, the modern day elements feel a bit dated. That said, the idea that (at least an element of) the military wants to weaponize time travel is probably just as valid now as it was in 1970. Speaking of which, while I am fascinated by the time travel mechanism; it really doesn't hold up, even in-universe. The return trip (keeping vague so as not to spoil) from 1882 mostly makes sense (with one major caveat), but I'm not so sure about the outbound trip - in terms of how quickly Si would have known of his success.
—Tracey
I sincerely call this my favorite book and have probably read it 6+ times since I was 12. Someone else mentions that it makes time travel actually believable. When I was younger I found myself wondering if I was in a place that I could hypnotize myself to travel back in time.... but anyway... the historical references and descriptions show the great thought put into this and allow you to feel like you're really there.But on the flip side, it can be pretty slow at times and kinda sappy. Hopefully you can get past that.
—Angela
WOW. I can't remember the last time I loved a book this much. I could not stop talking about it while I was reading it, I started reading it again as soon as I finished it, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to buy a copy for everyone on my Christmas list. It's that kind of book. Of course, I'm a sucker for books about New York, and the idea of traveling back in time to satisfy one's curiosity about an earlier, long-lost New York is pretty much catnip to me. The fact that Stephen King called it the best time-travel book ever written, and Audrey Niffenegger wrote the introduction to the new edition, certainly didn't hurt.There are a lot of other reasons to love this book. He gets at many of the more interesting questions of time travel, such as: Doesn't it seem like people really looked different in the past? Not just the clothes and the hairstyles, but don't their faces just seem different, somehow? This is actually a question that gets addressed in the novel.And the structure is very clever: the author has taken real events, real newspaper articles, and real photographs and drawings, and stitched together a narrative that puts his character at the center of those events. It's a very smart piece of work.In spite of all this, it's not a perfect book--and perhaps that's what I love most about it. There are a few long and dull descriptive passages, and the plot got a little convoluted in a couple of places--but the thing is, it's just such a charming and wonderful book that I didn't care about its flaws. Maybe I even loved it for its flaws.So--what to drink with a book about time travel in New York City? How about a punch very similar to what might have been served in bars in Manhattan in the 1880s? Convince some friends to read the book, have a party, and drink some punch. Here it is:Whiskey punch3/4 cup sugar2 cups black tea2 cups bourbon 1 cup dark rum1 cup cognac3/4 cup fresh-squeezed lemon juice3 cups waterWhole nutmegDissolve the sugar in the tea and allow to cool. Combine all ingredients in a large punch bowl. Before serving, add ice and grate nutmeg over the top. Serve in small punch cups or teacups. Serves 16 (or two drinks each for 8 guests, which sounds about right for a book club)
—Amy
