The past was, for him, another country that afforded a more casual pace of life, a time when faces carried less anxiety, more cheerful optimism.
Michael Beard noted in Dictionary of Literary Biography that "the portrait of an entire society straining semiconsciously to escape the present is a compact argument for the sensibility behind most of [Finney's] writings." But Beard also pointed out that Finney was not a writer to be categorized simply as someone working in science fiction because of the tendency on the part of many of his protagonists toward time travel. "The premise that time is malleable and subject to change through human emotions is not a common science-fiction theme," Beard wrote. "The science that underlies Finney's time-travel is often, properly speaking, not science, but sympathetic magic." Far from being a science fiction writer, or thriller writer as other critics have labeled him, or a mystery writer as still others have written, Finney was, at heart a romantic. "Finney creates ingenious, suspenseful narratives, treats regretfully, though sometimes humorously, the tensions and conflicts in mid-20th-century America," Seymour Rudin noted in St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers, "and contrasts the latter, though not always explicitly, with a romantic imagined pre-modern age."
In his best known works, such as The Body Snatchers, Time and Again, and the latter's sequel, From Time to Time, Finney casts a critical eye on the present.
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