time is the simplest thing

Imagine a world like ours. Government is lower key, hardly noticed, more like that of the 1920s. Science has failed. Oh, it still works, there are scientists and engineers. But the dream of space has been wrecked. Man is too frail for space, his machines too prone to fail. And so man never succeeds in moving to space. But there is another way. Magic, if you will. Or the extraordinary mental powers of the human mind that have never been developed. It depends on your point of view. With the aid of the scientific method, those powers have been isolated, grown into useable form. And one giant organization, Fishhook, has used them to reach the stars...sort of. Not as colonists, but artifacts can be retrieved, enough to be of commercial value...plants that grow steaks, medicines that can repair crushed and broken bodies to health, instantaneous transport to anywhere on the planet (but only on the planet.

But as everything is that duality of good and evil, so is Fishhook. For the first instinct of any organism or organization is to survive unto uselessness (and perhaps especially to try to survive past any use). And one faction of Fishhook, to preserve its monopoly on the use of the paranormal powers of the mind, is willing to stir up the fears of magic, of witches and warlocks, to the lynching of those who would use those powers outside of Fishhook. A new dark age of superstition sweeps the country, the night is again a frightful thing, full of goblins and what the paranormal can do.

But organizations are mortal. And the methods of Fishhook stand in juxaposition to that of the Church, possibly the oldest organization there is. And Fishhook�s days are numbered.

For one of Fishhook�s explorers, Shepherd Blaine, has met a being a million years old, that will probably live for a million more who likewise sends its mind out to explore the stars. And the being has an odd habit. In all friendliness, to those who befriend it, as Blaine does, it gives a gift�a carbon copy of its mind.

The consequences of that gift will change the world. For amid the methods of the mind that are thus bequeathed to Blaine is�

A good book, by one who hopefully seeks a better world. Perhaps this one is not redeemable. Maybe one of the things that America had going for it was that it was an escape for the rest of world. And one who could not abide Massachusetts could escape to Colorado. With the homogenization of the United States, where does one go who cannot fit in? Who needs more freedom or a different social order? Go where you will, there is no escape.

Thus the need for outer space. It promised a refuge for those who find no place. Maybe that promise, as in �Time is the Simplest Thing�, has broken down. Yet a way�

Well worth reading, on several levels.