Early Simak from 1950. This one is not as good as his later books. This one reads like early Jack Williamson or E. E. Doc Smith. It is not quite as good as either of those. As we know his later books will be good. ( )

This was Simak's first novel(la), and it painfully shows. There are paper thin characters, and there are superfluous names on a page... Cosmic Engineers has both. The writing also makes this feel like a first draft, and is littered with rookie grammar errors.

The plot is rushed, dull and only unpredictable when making unreasonable leaps in logic. It tries to come across as hard Sci fi, but really it's mostly nonsensical. Still, this is classic Simak in many respects; time travel, utopian ideals and benevolent aliens are all classic tropes of his present here. It can make for an enjoyable little space opera at times, but at the end of the day, it's just very average.

Maybe not technically the worst of Simak that I've read, but certainly the least interesting in terms of ideas, and probably the least entertaining. ( )

Clifford Simak's first published novel, this is a 1950 reworking of a story serialised in Astounding in 1939. And it shows. The writing style is definitely pre-war; although revised for its novel publication, it seems that this was only restricted to inserting references to atomic weapons. All the elements of Golden Age SF are there - rocket ships, scientific outposts on Pluto, suspended animation, messages from the Edge of Space, robots, space battles, mighty cities of unknowable purpose, an implacable foe and a Manifest Destiny for the human race!

After all that, it comes as a pleasant surprise to find that one of the chief protagonists is a woman scientist, frozen in suspended animation for a thousand years, and that this character is treated seriously by the author and is given the job of doing all the heavy lifting in the brain department. This doesn't stop the other characters referring to her in condescending ways.

But this is a minor relief. The galaxy-spanning trip to meet the Cosmic Engineers of the title takes no time at all, and all the action is packed into little more than 150 pages. Some people complain about the bloated nature of modern novels, but how can we get any idea of the real vastness of space when what we now know to be 14 billion light-years are traversed in the turn of a page? Whilst some of the science pays lip service to modern concepts (warping space, for instance), a lot of it is seriously outdated. In other books, this can sometimes be excused if the writing is vivid enough, but not here.

The style has all the clumsiness of its time. One character disappears for a whole chapter - he's there, but he says nothing - and another spends large portions of the novel clenching and unclenching his enormous fists. The chapter where our heroes stand up to and defeat the Implacable Foe, the so-called Hellhounds of Space, feels to me like the inspiration for the look and feel of Star Trek's episode Arena (even though Fredrick Brown got the credit for it), though this chapter feels as though it's been slotted into the novel to add some action to what would otherwise be a fairly preachy piece. I really could not get my head around the way that the citizens of the distant year 6947 still played physical chess, smoked pipes and read newspapers, whilst said Hellhounds relied for much of their offensive power on atomic bombs. A few years ago, I re-read some E.E. "Doc" Smith and found it wanting; this struck me as worse.

Having said all that, my 1967 Paperback Library edition has a charming Frank Frazetta cover. But the whole thing is more of a curiosity than a relevant piece of science fiction. ( )

Two reporters are looking for a story out in the wilds of space. They happen upon a derelict spaceship and revive its lone inhabitant from suspended animation. Her body had been frozen, but her mind had continued to expand and thus she's probably the smartest person ever. The group is called upon by a group called the Cosmic Engineers to 'save the universe' but one of our journalist heroes is skeptical and not sure whether they're to be trusted. Encounters with other alien species compound the issue as some of these others had attempted the whole universe saving thing before and were apparently unsuccessful.
I liked this one. Originally serialized in three 1939 issues of "Astounding", it was later expanded for publication as Simak's first novel. Having been a journalist himself, (for my hometown paper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune), the reporter character seems like an avatar, but not annoyingly so. Also, the inclusion of a female super-genius in a book from this era seems remarkably progressive.
I don't think I've ever had a bad time reading a Simak book, and this one just makes me eager to read more of his work. ( )

Two space-going newspapermen, an experimental pilot, a famous scientist, and a woman -- also a scientist -- who has been in suspended animation for a thousand years make contact with aliens from the edge of space, and are recruited to help save the universe from a devastating threat.

I liked this a lot. For much of the time I was reading it, I kept thinking that I liked it more than I probably really ought to. It was, after all, published in 1950, and it has a very old-fashioned feel to it, of a kind that does not often age well. The characters have a habit of standing around explaining things to each other in stilted fashion. Many of the scientific details are dated or downright nonsensical. And it plays on an SF trope I've come to dislike: the idea of humans as somehow extra-special and possessed of abilities or strength of character that nobody else in the universe has.

But, regardless, I liked it a lot. It's chock-full of interesting SF ideas, even if not all of them do make a whole lot of sense. And the old-fashioned feel it has, rather than feeling dusty and annoying, had a certain odd, nostalgic charm for me. Rather like watching an old black-and-white movie with slightly cheesy sensibilities, but surprisingly good production values. Or maybe an episode of the classic Twilight Zone. Although, towards the end, it began to feel more like original-series Star Trek to me (which I regard as no bad thing). There are moments where the writing is surprisingly evocative, in a low-key but effective way, conjuring up a real sense of the vastness and strangeness of the universe and the exciting possibilities of humanity's place in it. Plus, Simak may not have been the only SF author in 1950 able to write a female character who doesn't feel terribly offensive or embarrassing to modern readers, but there are certainly few enough of them to make it worth noting, anyway. ( )