Jack Finney is best remembered (to the extent that he is remembered at all) as the author of The Body Snatchers, the 1955 novel on which Don Siegel’s 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers was based. But his best-selling novel was another work of science fiction, Time and Again (1970), a delightful tale of time travel and romance that has seen a well-deserved resurgence after Stephen King credited it as the inspiration for his own time-travel romance, 11/22/63.

There is much to admire about Time and Again, especially Finney’s decision to rely on neither technology nor magic to transport his protagonist, Simon Morley, 88 years in the past, to the New York City of 1882. Instead, Si Morley relies on the power of his imagination to make the past live once again, which (to this reader at least) gives the novel a sort of “meta” quality. What Si does in the course of living the story is what Finney had to do in writing it, and what any historical novelist (or, for that matter, historian) must do in order to make another time come alive for his readers. Other ages do continue to exist, and we can visit them, so long as we are willing to make the imaginative effort.

There is the rub. Si travels to the past as part of a government project, and other recruits are less successful—a subtle commentary, perhaps, by Finney on the lack of imagination of the men and women of 1970. Today, of course, we live entirely in the present; the imaginative effort it would take to immerse ourselves in another time is too much to ask of most of our contemporaries. Which, I suspect Jack Finney would say, explains so much about modern life—and especially modern politics.

First published in the January 2017 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.