Pun Salad

I am pretty sure this is the first Clifford D. Simak book I read back in the 60s. I found a pic of the edition I still own, a 40¢ Ace paperback, purchased while on vacation with my family in Wyoming. (An inner stamp marks it as being from "Brundy's Bookstore" at 139 Cole Shopping Center in Cheyenne. The store and the mall it was in are long gone.)

I didn't remember much of anything about the book. Copyright date is 1951, and Simak's ornate style was on full display:

They climbed the last hundred yards and reached the man-made plateau, then stood and stared across the nightmare landscape, and as he looked, Sutton felt the cold hand of loneliness reach down with icy fingers to take him in its grip. For here was sheer, mad loneliness, such as he had never dreamed. Here was the very negation of life and motion, here was the stark, bald beginning when there was no life, nor even thought of life. Here anything that knew or thought or moved was an alien thing, a disease, a cancer on the face of nothingness.

[Page 99 in my edition, picked at random. It's typical.]

"Sutton" is Asher Sutton, returning to Earth after a couple decades after he went missing on a mission to a mysterious world in the 61 Cygni star system. Unfortunately, his old boss, who has kept Sutton on the payroll in the interim, has been previously visited by his time-travelling successor, who warns him about Sutton's imminent return, and tells him that Sutton must be killed!

Why? Well, it seems that Sutton's experiences have taught him the truth about Destiny. Each living thing is accompanied by Destiny, a kind of spirit being. (Sutton calls his "Johnny".) And Sutton plans to write a book about that. Which (in the future) will cause all kinds of mischief to all kinds of powerful people. Some of those people are homicidal, others just want to co-opt Sutton into writing a less inflammatory treatise.

There are androids, lots of them. And there's something odd about Sutton: as he returns to Earth, he has to remind himself to start breathing again; otherwise people might notice that he's not exactly human any more!

Sutton gets in some time-travelling of his own, meeting up with his centuries-previous ancestor in the fields of Wisconsin. Don't worry, grandpa survives the encounter! And I don't think there was any Futurama-style "nasty in the pasty".