Books like Ring Around the Sun

Love this SO much! I remember reading it, 20-something years before and loving every moment of it!To get the full impact of this novel, one has to realise this was one of the very first sci-fi books in my life. I started reading it out of sheer curiousity, just to see what it was about, this book I found stuck on the upper shelves of our home library. And gradually I grew to love it. The idea that at any point in time there are parallel worlds, which are simply on a different schedule on their move through time seemed pretty much innovative to me then. And then it blew my mind! The idea that a person might be able to just step back and forth between the worlds, the parallel ones, due to some private quirk of their genetic makeup? Liberating! Imagine that you can just move from the dust and weariness of the city to the nature as it was in the prehistoric times. And not through the paltry means of time-travel, which I found inherently slippery what with all the conundrums of the cause-and-effect ripples through time. Just imagine killing some fly in the Paleo and coming back and not finding your family? And whereever would your physical body go in this scenario? Just exactly how time and space would interact in this and a hundred of other conceivable unpleasant scenarios? And what about the inconceivable ones? Nasty and headache inducing! No, this story was different from all the crude time-fricking. It involved hidden abilities of some humans, born lucky or unlucky, depending on whether they managed to survive in that tumultous world. I loved every minute of this one and came back for a refresher multiple times. I think this one formed my later prefisposition to sci-fi and even to science altogether. Still love it and cherish those happy memories.Q:"A question," Vickers said, "One you didn't answer in there. Why did you spin that top?" (c)Q:"I'm suggesting that the knowledge is there and waiting, waiting for us to go out there and get it.""We haven't even reached the moon yet." (c)Q:We might reach out with our minds. ... A mind probing out and searching — a mind reaching out for a mind. If there is such a thing as telepathy, distance should make no difference — a half a mile or a light year, what would be the difference? For the mind is not a physical property, it is not bound, or should not be bound, by the laws that say that nothing can exceed the speed of light. (c)Q:Vickers sat on the porch, smoked his cigarettes and stared at the patch of sky he could see between the top of the hedge and the porch's roof… at the sky and its crystal wash of stars, thinking that one could not sense the distance and the time that lay between the stars. ...He sat alone in the attic, listening to the wind that whispered in the eaves. (c)Q:Fifteen years ago he had faced a certain problem and after a time, in his own way, had solved it, without realizing he had solved it, by retreat from the human race. He had retreated until his back was against the wall and there, for a while, he had found peace. Now, in some strange way, his sense of "hunch," this undefined feeling that was almost prescience, seemed to be telling him that the world and the affairs of men had sought him out again. But now he could retreat no further, even if he wanted to. Curiously, he did not seem to want to, and that was just as well, for there was no place to go. He had shrunk back from humanity and he could shrink no farther. (c)Q:And Ann?Ann had within her the life of that girl who had walked the valley with him — the girl he remembered as Kathleen Preston, but who had some other name. For Ann remembered the valley and that she had walked the valley in the springtime with someone by her side.There might be more than Ann. There might be three of Ann just as there were three of him, but that didn't matter, either. Maybe Ann's name really was Ann Carter as his really was Jay Vickers. Maybe that meant that, when the lives drained back into the rightful bodies, it would be his consciousness and Ann's consciousness that would survive.And it was all right now to love Ann. For she was a separate person and not a part of him. (c)Q:You could not wipe out the years of living, you could not pile them neatly in a corner and walk away and leave them. They could be wiped from out your mind and they would be forgotten, but not forever, and the day would come when they'd break through again. And once they'd found you out you'd know that you had lived not one lie, but two.That was the trouble, you couldn't hide away the past. (c)Q:Queer as it may be, it seems right. This other world and the things we have, those strange abilities and all and the strange remembering. (c)Q:More Worlds Than One, Says Savant. ... A sort of continuous chain of words, one behind the other... That is the theory of Dr. Vincent Aldridge. (c)Q:"We organized... and we swung a lot of power, as you can well imagine. We made certain representations and we brought certain pressures and we got a few things done. For one thing, no newspaper, no periodical, no radio station, now will accept advertising for any of the gadgets nor give them any mention in the news. For another, no reputable drug store or any other place of business will sell a razor blade or a bulb or lighter." (c)Q:He had to be an eight-year-old. He had to go back to childhood once again. He must clear away his mind, sweep out all adult thoughts, all the adult worry, all sophistication. He must become a child.He thought of playing in the sand, of napping under trees, of the feel of soft dust beneath bare feet. He closed his eyes and concentrated and caught the vision of a childhood and the color and the smell of it.He opened his eyes and watched the stripes and filled his mind with wonder, with the question of their being and the question of where they went when they disappeared....A child had no conception of time. For the child, time went on forever and forever. He was a little boy and he had all the time there was and he owned a brand new top. (c)Q:"How will they take it?" asked the drawling voice. "When they find they're android?" (c)Q:"Telepathy?" asked Vickers."That's it," said the man. "They don't listen to the stars really, but to people who live on the stars. Now ain't that the screwiest thing you ever heard of — listening to the stars!" (c)Q:So here... was the difference from the Earth ahead, the tiny aberration that made a different world. Far back, somehow, there had been a difference that had blocked Man from rising, some minor incident, no doubt; some failing of the spark of intellect. Here there had been no striking of the flint for fire, no grasping of a stone that would become a weapon, no wonder glowing in the brutish brain — a wonder that in later years would become a song or painting or a single paragraph of exquisite writing or a flowing poem… (c)Q:"My friend, have you ever thought about the ability of hunch. I don't mean the feeble hunch that is used on the racetrack to pick a winner or the hunch about whether it is going to rain or not, or whether some other minor happening is going to take place… but the ability in the fullness of its concept. You might say it is the instinctive ability to assess the result of a given number of factors, to know, without actually thinking the matter out, what is about to happen. It's almost like being able to peek into the future." ..."Your hunches don't work... because you don't give them a chance. You still have the world of reason to contend with. You put your reliance on the old machine-like reasoning that the human race has relied on since it left the caves. You figure out every angle and you balance it against every other angle and you add up and cancel out as if you were doing a problem in arithmetic. You never give hunch a chance. That's the trouble with you." ..."Hunch — the highest, most developed hunch ability that ever has been registered in a human being. The highest eve registered and the most unsuspected, the least used of any we have ever known." (c)Q:"Then there's this business of listening to the stars.""We've gotten many good ideas that way," Q: "Not all of us can do it. Just some of us, who are natural telepaths. And as I told you that night we talked, not all the ideas are ones that we can use. Sometimes we just get a hint of something and we go on from there." (c)Q:"Earth Number Two, is it? And what about Number Three?""It's there, waiting when we need it. Worlds without end, waiting when we need them. We can go on pioneering for generation after generation. A new earth for each new generation if need be, but they say we won't be needing them that fast." (c)Q:THE land lay new and empty of any mark of Man, a land of raw earth and sky; even the wildness of the wind that swept across it seemed to say that the land was untamed.From his hilltop, Vickers saw bands of dark, moving shapes that he felt sure were small herds of buffalo and even as he watched three wolves came loping up the slope, saw him and veered off, angling down the hill. In the blue sweep of sky that arched from horizon to horizon without a single cloud a bird wheeled gracefully, spying out the land. It screeched and the screech came down to Vickers as a high, thin sound filtered through the sky.The top had brought him through. He was safe in this empty land with wolves and buffalo.He climbed to the ridgetop and looked across the reaches of the grassland, with its frequent groves and many watercourses, sparkling in the sun. There was no sign of human habitation — no roads, no threads of smoke sifting up the sky.He looked at the sun and wondered which way was west and thought he knew, and if he was right, the sun said it was midmorning. But if he was wrong, it was midafternoon and in a few hours darkness would come upon the land. And when darkness came, he would have to figure out how to spend the night.He had meant to go into «fairyland» and this, of course, wasn't it. If he had stopped to think about it, he told himself, he would have known that it would not be, for the place he had gone to as a child could not have been fairyland. This was a new and empty world, a lonely and perhaps a terrifying world, but it was better than the back room of a hardware store in some unknown town with his fellow men hunting him to death.He had come out of the old, familiar world into this new, strange world and if the world were entirely empty of human life, then he was on his own.He sat down and emptied his pockets and made an inventory of what he had. A half a package of cigarettes; three packs of matches, one almost finished, one full, one with just a match or two gone from it; a pocket knife; a handkerchief; a billfold with a few dollars in it; a few cents in change; the key to the Forever car; a keyring with the key to the house and another to the desk and a couple of other keys he couldn't identify; a mechanical pencil; a few half sheets of paper folded together, pocket size, on which he had intended to make notes if he saw anything worth noting — and that was all. Fire and a tool with a cutting edge and a few hunks of worthless metal — that was the sum of what he had.If this world were empty, he must face it alone. He must feed himself and defend himself and find shelter for himself and, in time to come, contrive some way in which to clothe himself.He lit a cigarette and tried to think, but all that he could think about was that he must go easy on the cigarettes, for the half pack was all he had and when those were gone, there would be no more.An alien land — but not entirely alien, for it was Earth again, the old familiar Earth unscarred by the tools of Man. It had the air of Earth and the grass and sky of Earth, and even the wolves and buffalo were the same as old Earth had borne. Perhaps it was Earth. It looked for all the world like the primal Earth might have looked before it lay beneath Man's hand, before Man had caught and tamed it and bound it to his will, before Man had stripped and gutted it and torn all its treasures from it.It was no alien land — no alien dimension into which the top had flung him, although, of course, it had not been the top at all. The top hadn't had anything to do with it. The top was simply something on which one focused one's attention, simply a hypnotic device to aid the mind in the job which it must do. The top had helped him come into this land, but it had been his mind and that strange otherness that was his which had enabled him to travel from old familiar Earth to this strange, primal place.There was something he had heard or read…He went searching for it, digging back into his brain with frantic mental fingers.A new story, perhaps. Or something he had heard. Or something he had seen on television.It came to him finally — the story about the man in Boston — a Dr. Aldridge, he seemed to remember, who had said that there might be more worlds than one, that there might be a world a second ahead of ours and one a second behind ours and another a second behind that and still another and another and another, a long string of worlds whirling one behind the other, like men walking in the snow, one man putting his foot into the other's track and the one behind him putting his foot in the same track and so on down the line.An endless chain of worlds, one behind the other. A ring around the Sun. ...THE land lay new and empty of any mark of Man, a land of raw earth and sky; even the wildness of the wind that swept across it seemed to say that the land was untamed.From his hilltop, Vickers saw bands of dark, moving shapes that he felt sure were small herds of buffalo and even as he watched three wolves came loping up the slope, saw him and veered off, angling down the hill. In the blue sweep of sky that arched from horizon to horizon without a single cloud a bird wheeled gracefully, spying out the land. It screeched and the screech came down to Vickers as a high, thin sound filtered through the sky.The top had brought him through. He was safe in this empty land with wolves and buffalo.He climbed to the ridgetop and looked across the reaches of the grassland, with its frequent groves and many watercourses, sparkling in the sun. There was no sign of human habitation — no roads, no threads of smoke sifting up the sky.He looked at the sun and wondered which way was west and thought he knew, and if he was right, the sun said it was midmorning. But if he was wrong, it was midafternoon and in a few hours darkness would come upon the land. And when darkness came, he would have to figure out how to spend the night.He had meant to go into «fairyland» and this, of course, wasn't it. If he had stopped to think about it, he told himself, he would have known that it would not be, for the place he had gone to as a child could not have been fairyland. This was a new and empty world, a lonely and perhaps a terrifying world, but it was better than the back room of a hardware store in some unknown town with his fellow men hunting him to death.He had come out of the old, familiar world into this new, strange world and if the world were entirely empty of human life, then he was on his own.He sat down and emptied his pockets and made an inventory of what he had. A half a package of cigarettes; three packs of matches, one almost finished, one full, one with just a match or two gone from it; a pocket knife; a handkerchief; a billfold with a few dollars in it; a few cents in change; the key to the Forever car; a keyring with the key to the house and another to the desk and a couple of other keys he couldn't identify; a mechanical pencil; a few half sheets of paper folded together, pocket size, on which he had intended to make notes if he saw anything worth noting — and that was all. Fire and a tool with a cutting edge and a few hunks of worthless metal — that was the sum of what he had.If this world were empty, he must face it alone. He must feed himself and defend himself and find shelter for himself and, in time to come, contrive some way in which to clothe himself.He lit a cigarette and tried to think, but all that he could think about was that he must go easy on the cigarettes, for the half pack was all he had and when those were gone, there would be no more.An alien land — but not entirely alien, for it was Earth again, the old familiar Earth unscarred by the tools of Man. It had the air of Earth and the grass and sky of Earth, and even the wolves and buffalo were the same as old Earth had borne. Perhaps it was Earth. It looked for all the world like the primal Earth might have looked before it lay beneath Man's hand, before Man had caught and tamed it and bound it to his will, before Man had stripped and gutted it and torn all its treasures from it.It was no alien land — no alien dimension into which the top had flung him, although, of course, it had not been the top at all. The top hadn't had anything to do with it. The top was simply something on which one focused one's attention, simply a hypnotic device to aid the mind in the job which it must do. The top had helped him come into this land, but it had been his mind and that strange otherness that was his which had enabled him to travel from old familiar Earth to this strange, primal place.There was something he had heard or read…He went searching for it, digging back into his brain with frantic mental fingers.A new story, perhaps. Or something he had heard. Or something he had seen on television.It came to him finally — the story about the man in Boston — a Dr. Aldridge, he seemed to remember, who had said that there might be more worlds than one, that there might be a world a second ahead of ours and one a second behind ours and another a second behind that and still another and another and another, a long string of worlds whirling one behind the other, like men walking in the snow, one man putting his foot into the other's track and the one behind him putting his foot in the same track and so on down the line.An endless chain of worlds, one behind the other. A ring around the Sun.... He set off, striding down the hill, heading for the north-west, toward the one hope he had in all the world. ... He kept going on. There was nothing else to do. (c) I couldn't help quoting this chapter. It's my favvy fav. It reads like something otherworldly. Well, it IS otherworldly.