Quite an influential book for its time with the alternative worlds etc, and he's good with description and scene setting but I find the ideas and plot a bit overdone somehow. ( )

Typical easy to read Simak style with Interesting ideas. I like this one more then most of his novels. As usual I will read anything he has written. I don't want to miss a good one. ( )

"Un anillo alrededor del sol" ha sido descrita en alguna ocasión como la maravillosa historia de un juguete infantil que abre las puertas de infinitos universos probables. La historia protagonizada por el escritor Jay Vickers, que se ve inmerso en un conflicto de consecuencias impredecibles y que afecta por igual a los dos lados del telón de acero, constituye, además de una intensa historia de intriga, la explicación más clara y divertida que se ha escrito jamás de la teoría de la relatividad.

This text is actually two permeable stories whose connecting element is a humming top which works similarly to the one in Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010).
In my view, the first story is a parable that depicts the superiority of life experienced as a series of meaningful events by themselves rather than as the outcome of them, whereas the second one is completely different. What I found interesting in these last chapters is the postulate that mutants are the human outliers among their equals in nature, that is, what we call the modern Prometheis, the pioneers, the geniuses of each epoch. Also, there is a layer in this second part of the novel that is fairly grotesque in the style of William Blake's The Chimney Sweeper, since people who are worse off in this world are being permanently removed from it and placed in other paradise-like Earths, and it goes without saying that in this section the plot gets quite intriguing. ( )

Though I'm a longtime fan of science fiction, I have often found something a little formulaic about most of the novels from the "golden era" of the genre. The problem is not with the premise -- though that can crop up from time to time -- so much as with the plot, which typically functions in the standard pattern of boy-meets-girl, boy-fights-antagonists (usually against seemingly overwhelming but ultimately surmountable odds), boy-gets-girl. For a while, though, I thought that with this novel I had found one of the exceptions. For much of its length Clifford Simak kept me guessing as to who Jay Vickers was and the role he was going to play. Then I got to the end, and the last development -- where the girl Ann Carter, who Simak had hinted might be a fragment of Jay's splintered persona, was actually the long-lost love of his life after all -- just felt like a total cop out. It was as though Simak was at the brink of doing something that would have been incredibly daring and far-sighted for a novel of the early 1950s, then wavered and reverted back to the comfortable clichés of his time. It doesn't mean the novel isn't worth reading, but it left me with a sense of disappointment at having witnessed something that could have been so much greater than it turned out to be. ( )