To Be Continued Next Century

By * Martha Duffy

TIME AND AGAIN by Jack Finney. 399 pages. Simon & Schuster. $7.95.

Word has been out for a year or so that science fiction is in trouble. With all the routine miracles being provided by doctors and astronauts, what spaced-out situations are left for the imagination? The solution seems to lie in the past rather than the future. Last year Daphne du Maurier welded the 14th century to the 20th in House on the Strand. Now veteran Screenwriter Jack Finney (The Body Snatchers) tries the same sort of literary retreat, but into the New York City of the 1880s.

The idea is that some Washington technocrats decide to test Einstein's theory that the past and the future coexist with the present. They persuade a spongelike commercial artist to live in the doughty old Dakota apartment building overlooking Central Park and, surrounded by artifacts of the time, hypnotize himself back eighty years. Nothing is simpler. The past is apparently right behind the eyeball. In no time the fellow is shuttling between centuries, meddling with history and falling in love with a girl who, he reminds himself, died some decades ago.

The gimmick is good enough. Alas, the characters are solid pine and the plot is upholstered with historical minutiae that quickly become tedious. Moreover, the book is illustrated with old photographs, prints and sketches supposedly drawn by the hero. Altogether a painfully literal effort, except for those who take joy in minute historical coincidence. Like the fact that New York had a ball team way back then called the Metropolitans. But those Mets had pitching problems.

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