Product Description
ABOUT TIME offers a delightful return to the world of time travel and light comedy that distinguished Jack Finney's all-time classic TIME AND AGAIN. The protagonists of these 12 stories are well-meaning but at odds with their surroundings and their lives. The time to which they escape--through time travel--doesn't fulfill their expectations in the way they had hoped, but sometimes they find their dreams.
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 The One True Master ( carbonadam )
Jack Finney is simply amazing. His short stories are poignant, prophetic, intelligent, and scary. He accomplishes all this in sometimes only a handful of pages. "I'm Scared" is still to this day more unnerving than most horror films. I still get goose-bumps reading it and pondering the reality of that small story.
Every story is great, yet each seems better than the last. The simple fact is that the more often you re-read them the more depth they tend to have.
I find his stories to be some of the most important sci-fi I have ever read. He is indispensable to any fan of the genre. he is also a must read for anyone who longs for the past.
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TIME TRAVEL BY A MASTER ( cgrunert )
Jack Finney is one of the great writers of time travel stories. His stories were used often on "Twilight Zone" (the original)series. His style of writing is very easy to read but has so much depth and life to them. One story in the book is about some unusual citizens who have "modern" inventions that baffle their new neighbors. A lot of the stories have characters that hunger for more "nostalgic" times and remain wistful in nature. I highly recommend this book.
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 Fun stories ( thewere )
The story stories are fun and sometimes cute, it is a relaxing book to read.
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A collection of clever stories ( debra_hamel )
The twelve stories in this collection by the author of Invasion of the Body Snatchers were originally published in 1957 and 1962. The stories are similar to Finney's classic novel Time and Again--in which the book's protagonist travels back to late 19th-century New York--both because nearly all of them have to do with time travel ("Lunch-Hour Magic" and "Home Alone" are exceptions) and because many of the characters express their dissatisfaction with the modern world and wish to escape from it. Usually this flight from modernity is to be achieved by time travel, but it can also take the form of interplanetary migration ("Of Missing Persons") or balloon flight ("Home Alone").
Time travel in these stories is achieved almost effortlessly, when the "thousand invisible chains" that keep us in the present--modern coins and manufactured items, apartment buildings--are, for a moment, loosed. If there's nothing on you that wouldn't belong in the world fifty or sixty or seventy years ago, and if you're in a place that hasn't been altered much in all that time, and if you're in the right frame of mind, you can slip into the past, easy as can be. Just so, the car-obsessed college student of Finney's "Second Chance," while driving along an old highway in his restored Jordan Playboy, finds himself sharing the road with Model T's. His brief presence in the past has the effect of altering history in a way that will influence his own future.
Al and his wife Nell of Finney's "Such Intersting Neighbors" find the Hellenbeks, who have just moved into their California neighborhood, strange but pleasant. Ted Hellenbek is an inventor, an intelligent guy who was born and raised in the U.S., and yet he fumbles with his money, unable to count it out himself, when he has to pay the driver of his cab upon his arrival in town. Alfred Pullen buys a paper with a 1958 Wilson dime in "The Coin Collector" and finds himself at once in an alternative universe where such coins exist--and where he has married a different woman. In "Where the Cluetts Are" an architect helps a couple build a house following blueprints that belonged to his grandfather. The house, with its peaked roof and many gables, is an anachronism, and it has a curious effect on its inhabitants. In "Lunch-Hour Magic" an advertising agency employee buys a pair of glasses that allow him to see through women's clothes:
"I kept the glasses on nearly all afternoon, wandering around the office with a sheaf of papers in my hand, and strangely it was Mrs. Humphrey, our middle-aged overweight bookkeeper, that I stared at longest. Last year, I knew, she'd celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of her marriage to her husband, Harvey. But there, unmistakably, tattooed on her left hip, was a four-inch high red heart inside which, in a slanted blue script, was inscribed Ralph, and I wondered if she'd had the fearsome job of hiding it from Harvey for a quarter of a century."
Finney writes well--that "fearsome job" is quite good--and his stories are clever. If they are not quite as well done as his novels, this collection nevertheless makes a pleasant and easy read.
Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece
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Quiet, nice stories . . . and that's okay sometimes ( mksmith1 )
Finney is sort of the Clifford Simak of time travel, as best expressed in his classic novel, _Time and Again_. The shorter pieces in this volume originally appeared in _The Third Level_ and _I Love Galesburg in the Springtime,_ and have been reprinted many times elsewhere, as well, but they're still perfect reading for that warm summer Sunday afternoon in the hammock. The "furniture" in these stories -- the social commentary, the cultural backdrop of the 1950s -- may seem rather dated, but all of them share a wistfulness that transcends the period in which they were written. In "The Coin Collector" (also published as "The Woodrow Wilson Dime"), a man finds an odd bit of coinage in his pocket change, an artifact of a closely parallel world, in which he married a different girl and took a different job, and in which Mark Twain wrote another Huck Finn novel. He finds it all very exciting -- for a while. "Of Missing Persons" is about the opportunity to *really* get away from it all, and how to blow your only chance. "The Third Level" is about being able to catch a train back into a quieter, happier past. One definitely gets the impression that Finney would rather have been anywhere else than the mid-20th century -- a feeling most of us probably share from time to time, but we forget that the "Good Old Days" never really happened. So these stories might be considered naive -- but still, they're very pleasant reading.
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