I finished
Dr. Orpheus by Ian Wallace. And it was such a strange book. Written in 1968, I've got the '69 Medallion edition... I think I picked it up from a Tiny Free Library in the neighborhood because of the catching art on the cover:
It's the second book in a series but they share only the protagonist the stories not being related otherwise. And, the whole book is just so different from anything I see on shelves today. As the back cover describes, "To meet the two fold threat, Croyd must exercise his amazing abilities to the fullest, resorting to time travel, mind transfers, and a breath taking swift shell game of body transpositions, all the while battling the greatest odds..."
It is interesting to see what readers were interested in or would tolerate in science fiction in the the 60s. The story has Croyd running up and down the "time stream" as well as in and out of physical and psychical space to no. The fiction space for stories was either wider or more forgiving? Probably a little of both? I suppose readers were more willing to spend 75 cents or so on even just 'okay' fiction and the margins were good enough for smaller print and press runs of these sort of things. The book publishing world seems much more dependent on whales and sure things these days than it did.
Anyway the story was confusing contradictory at times, and weaves back around itself half a dozen times or so. Such are time traveling adventures. And there is still a bit of the pulps in here with Croyd being a superhuman of sorts all while declaring about universal humanity and the rights of sentient beings. A lot of optimism that the genre lacks these days. Oh, and the gender dynamics of the far future (2502) as imagined by 1968 white cis-male (I am assuming here, he had a wife but there isn't a lot out on the internet about Ian Wallace) are quaint. I am almost tempted to dig up some of his other works. He died in 1998 but his last published work was 9 years earlier.
I'd recommend it just for how different it seems from most if not all of the sci-fi we get today.