review of
Clifford D. Simak's Mastodonia
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - May 17, 2013

I think this is the 1st Simak novel I've read, maybe I've read some short stories. It seems that he always struck me somehow as a 'generic' SF writer - not necessarily such a 'bad' thing, I'd rather read a 'generic' SF writer than a generic horror writer anyday. Nonetheless, something about his work, maybe the titles, put me off.

HOWEVER, reading this, I enjoyed it. At 1st, he seemed like a California SF writer, like Rudy Rucker & suchlike - someone whose characters might smoke pot & go to the beach. Then I realized that he was writing about Wisconsin, specifically the driftless region where the glaciers of the ice age had never reached, where the megafauna & megaflora had flourished, where there were 8 foot beavers, a place where my friend mIEKAL aND has his Dreamtime Village. That peaked my interest.

In Mastodonia there's a crashed being from another planet, a creature capable of time travel. This creature's way of appearing is directly referential to Lewis Carroll's Cheshire Cat - w/o that ever being named. I liked that. I reckon that Simak took it for granted that his readers wd 'get' the reference & wd imagine that the Cheshire Cat character had been inspired by this crashed alien.

Another character, Hiram, is a 'simpleton' of sorts, one that can communicate w/ many non-human creatures:

""Hiram's not crazy. He's just a simpleton."

""Maybe it takes gently crazy people and simpletons and dogs to do things we can't do. Maybe they have abilities we don't have...."" - p 47

I'd like to think so.

I didn't take many notes about this bk in preparation for writing this review. As w/ so much SF, I read it for 'pleasure' & just enjoyed the ride. Most of what I wd've written about wd've just been the plot. There was plenty here to keep me entertained,

Simak approached the time travel theme from several angles I hadn't previously encountered. I particularly like that the scientist who'd suspected the existence of a crashed spaceship had a scientist girlfriend who immediately started scheming about how to make money off it all. Then a Senator proposes giving the urban poor a fresh start in a prehistoric era.

I was even a bit surprised when I felt like the reader was being set-up for a betrayal by the protagonist's old banker friend.. &, then, well.. maybe I shdn't say..

Simak's yet-another SF writer I'm glad to've finally read. Along w/ a few tens of thousands of other bks, I hope to read more by him. I'd better get to work. ( )

I found this to be a fun book although it was a little slow in the beginning. From the jacket flap: "Time-travelng turns into big business and big trouble when a casual walk down a farm path ... leads to the Pleistocene." Simak didn't have his characters worry too much about paradoxes. They were, especially Rila, more into making money from the very distant past. There's the alien who opens time paths for them, there's Bowser the dog, and the people of the small town who get into the act with dollar signs in their minds.

Did not finish.
Maybe someday I'll come back to it because the idea is interesting, but the writing style bothers me. There's an awful pattern of telling what happened in the past, and while I'm usually okay with an author not being vigilant about the "don't tell them, show them" rule of writing, this was too much.

This is definitely not a bad SF and Simak is still one of my favorite go-to classic SF authors. Even the basic tale of a time machine to colonize the past or otherwise get rich off of stupid hunters who think they're the match for dinosaurs is well done if an old tale.

Of course, later novels such as Jurassic Park blows modest SF like this away, but then... maybe not. :) Time travel tales usually get a bad rap. I don't know why. I enjoyed this one for what it was: popcorn fiction. :)

Even the tax evasion schemes by setting up your own country in the deep past were funny and still feels timely. It's not like they were huge corporations. More like they were a small business trying to make it work despite all the static. :)

Simak remains a charming writer that I cannot find any fault with at all. He was never all that spectacular or ground-breaking, but he was always thoughtful, exploratory, and he always developed characters who never left a bad taste in the mouth. :) Oh, and he never went the corny route, either, for which I love him dearly. :)
( )

This is a hard one. I never expected to give any Simak novel anything less then 4 stars. I really love his work. This one just didn't make it. The story was interesting, fun and annoying.

I would have enjoyed it more but the seemingly clever characters made one wild decision after another. I would have been OK with that but they never seemed to stop and consider the consequences of their actions. They were hell bent to go fast until the wheels come off with no belief that the wheels could come off.

It's still a good story in the Simak tradition. ( )