Shep Blaine is part of a program that contacts alien begings telepathically, thus avoiding the dificulties of interstellar physical exploration. In his last excursion he encounters a mind that is massively alien to the conditions of scientific research on Earth in the 1950's. He literally is now a "Man who knows too much" not only for government purposes, but also for the continuance of organized politics on Earth. He'a on the run, with no allies, but with a massive secret in his head. Trapped in small town America, things look bleak for our hero! ( )

Simak, Clifford D. Time Is the Simplest Thing. 1961. Open Road, 2015.
It is a pity that Clifford D. Simak never became as famous as Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, or Isaac Asimov. Yes, he was the third SFWA grandmaster, and his 1961 novel Time is the Simplest Thing was nominated for a Hugo Award, but it never became a cultural icon like Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, published the same year. Simak kept his day job as a Minnesota journalist and imbued his stories with a sense of American communities and landscape that resembles Bradbury at his best. Simak also gives Time Is the Simplest Thing a science news hook that would be right at home in a story by Asimov. The newly discovered Van Allen radiation belt is a harbinger of dangers inherent in space flight. The failure of crewed space flight spurs research in out-of-body travel and other paranormal abilities. We begin to explore extraterrestrial life with mental powers augmented by machines. Our hero, Shepherd Blaine, comes home from one such mission with an alien consciousness resident in his mind. His discovery makes him a dangerous outcast and sends him on an odyssey through the nation’s paranormal hinterlands. ( )

I will always give Simak novels a try but this one annoyed me. It took ideas that could be used in three or more novels and threw them together. Spoiler alert!

1. Telepathic space exploration with the danger of meeting superior alien minds that can take you over and make you a danger to mankind or superman. Great idea and well done beginning of book. This could have won a Hugo but it de-solved into another novel.

2. In future world some people have become super psychic. Some can project their minds. Others can read minds. Others can levitate objects or themselves and fly. the rest of America has become afraid that all of the Halloween characters are now real and try to kill the super brains.

3. Giant corporation controls it's employees and hunts them down if they escape. Harmless individuals on the run with secrets. Kill or be killed.

Every one of these could have made a good novel. Instead he mashed them all together and never resolved any of them. No real ending. Maybe he needed another book and he used some unfinished ideas. ( )

High 2.

Starts off fairly solid - if a little strange - with an interesting concept and the potential for a great story. Unfortunately, at around half way through the quality of the writing plummets. There are some really good ideas, but what could have been a good strong science fiction novel is watered down by clunky exposition and a poorly developed last minute romance. ( )

What starts off as an intriguing novel about encountering an ineffable alien intelligence ("the Pinkness") soon degenerates into an ode to paranormal humans that attempts a naive examination of bigotry.

There was, in the sixties, an over-earnest interest in the paranormal (ESP, telekinesis, etc) among sci-fi writers. Normally, when paranormal abilities are part of a narrative, they are a simple fact: this person can do X, that person can do Y, nobody can explain it (hence it is para-normal) but that's the way it is. In novels such as this, however, paranormal abilities are presented as the next step in human evolution, and the people with paranormal powers in general are endowed as well with traits such as intelligence, compassion, and tolerance that are considered characteristic of homo enlighticus and absent from its predecessor, homo hillbillicus.

This is compounded in Simak's novel by the rather crude caricature of people who aren't paranormal. There is no subtlelty here: your typical bigot will be loud, unreasonable, cowardly, smelly, unable to stand upright or to project competence and honesty. That can work fine in, say, a fairy tale, where you do not want to explain to a child that well, the world is complicated, and that witch has a mortgage to pay and her daughter has been kidnapped for sexual slavery so maybe, you know, maybe those two kids are holding a match to a powder keg when they start eating her house. If what you want is a fairy tale, then okay, this is a fine one; as a novel, well, it's a bit lop-sided.
( )