A man living in two worlds is the premise of an earlier Finney novel, The Woodrow Wilson Dime (1968). In this novel, however, the worlds exist sideby-side rather than in sequence. Ben Bennell discovers that spending a Woodrow Wilson dime sends him into a parallel but different universe in which he is married to a different woman and holds a different job.

The Woodrow Wilson Dime, though, is comic while Time and Again is nostalgic. The longing for a better past appears in several stories included in Finney's second collection of stories, I Love Galesburg in the Springtime (1963).

In the title story a town actively resists the inroads of the present: A trolley magically appears to scare off a factory builder, and a horse-drawn fire engine unexpectedly saves a burning Victorian mansion. In "Where the Cluetts Are," a modern couple build a house from nineteenth-century architectural plans...