Another age

A collection from the so called golden age of SF, from 1940s to 1960s. Unfortunately, I found most of this somewhat simplistic, written for the everyday man in an age when most such men were not even high school graduates. ( )

I once had access to this but lost said access mid-read. Rather than take it off my currently-reading like a sensible chap, I planned to (eventually) purchase a copy and finish, but this never happened. Instead, I took the much more convoluted route of collecting vintage (and not-so vintage) Simak paperbacks that also happened to contain one or two of the stories contained within this collection, slowly and gradually making my way through the same stories. The benefit of this is I love vintage sci-fi paperbacks, and the novelty of tracking down certain collections and admiring the art while flicking through brittle pages brought me much delight. The disadvantage is that the Open Road collections feature new introductions to each story by Dave Wixon, friend of Simak and manager of the estate; something that I would very much have liked to have read, but only managed a few while having access to that particular collection.

Anywho, now I have finally completed my mission, ending triumphantly on "All the Traps of the Earth", collected in two different copies of the same collection on my shelf (bearing the same name as the story). I started reading it in this beautiful Four Square copy, only for the pages to almost immediately start coming apart, and so quickly switched to my NEL copy, which is less aesthetically appealing. Since this process has been dragged out for such a long period of time, some of the stories have drifted from memory. I rated each as I went, but only jotted thoughts down for some. Here are the scattered thoughts and ratings that surfaced:

Instalment Plan - 3.5
I skipped this one, seeing as I had already read it previously in "The Night of Puudly". Rating carried over.

I Had No Head and My Eyes Were Floating Way Up in the Air - 3.5

Small Deer - 3
Skipped and rating carried over. Read previously in "The Best of Clifford Simak".

Ogre - ( 2.75)
Started and failed to finish in this collection, re-attempted and completed in "Off-planet" (1988).

Gleaners 3.5
Read in this collection, but I couldn't remember if I'd read it, so ended up reading it again in "The Autumn Land and Other Stories". It's a fun, lighthearted time-travel story from the perspective of a man who, regrettably, isn't a time traveller. The ending is a little over-tidy, but the story is more or less farcical enough to get a pass on logic.

Madness from Mars (2.5)
Skipped and rating carried over. Read previously in "The Best of Clifford Simak".

Gunsmoke Interlude - 4
Short, tight, satisfying little nugget. Great ending. I've not heard anything good about Simak and his Westerns, but this was one of the better stories in the collection.

I Am Crying All Inside - 5
A very moving story, written in a very straightforward way. In spite of its simplicity, it's quite possibly one of Simak's best. I originally read this in this collection, but read it a 2nd time after acquiring "Immigrant and Other Stories".

The Call From Beyond - 2.9
A bizarre and clunky, yet strangely engrossing story. Conjures up associations with Lem's Solaris, with a man coming to investigate a research station only to find a bizarre set of circumstances and a whole lot of secrets. There's an appeal to the onslaught of whimsy, but ultimately it's a rushed hodgepodge of plot elements that would have been better suited to a novella. I ended up reading this digitally, which I always like to avoid where possible. This was a PDF copy of a May 1950 issue of "Super Science Stories".

All the Traps of the Earth - 3.75
A Simak classic, as I understand it. Certainly a story I often see get brought up by Simak fans. I enjoyed it very much, though I wasn't very invested in the concept of a mechanical individual evolving to develop psychic abilities, which turns out to be a pretty significant element. It is a great example of pastoral Simak leaking into the epic reaches of space though. There's the same flavour here that you'll find in stories like Way Station and City. Read in the vintage paperback collection of the same name (linked earlier in the review). ( )

Mix of old Simak stories, some great, some ok. Including a short western piece. ( )

A look at a few of the stories.

“Installment Plan” from 1959 is one of those anthropological stories (why are those aliens acting so weird?) common in 1950s and 1960s science fiction. Simak is best remembered for his dogs-and-robots novel City. This story cuts out the dogs but the human-robot relationship is described in terms of man and dog. A team from Central Trading is sent to a planet to make a trade deal with the local aliens who have a herb, podar, which is the perfect tranquilizer. (Don’t get smug about 1950 Americans and their tranquilizers. We consume a lot more prescription psychotropics today.) An interesting ecological detail is that humans have tried to cultivate the herb, but only some protozoan on the aliens’ planet allows it to grow there. The robots of the story have skill modules they swap out of their bodies according to the task at hand.

But it’s what happens at the end to the story that makes it memorable and another version of Simak’s wariness about capitalism.

I have to admit that the main point of interest for me in Simak’s “I Had No Head and My Eyes Were Floating Way Up in the Air” was finding out what was considered cutting edge, taboo breaking science fiction by Simak when he wrote this for Harlan Ellison’s never published anthology The Last Dangerous Visions. Like Simak’s “Desertion”, it has a man transformed into an alien form. A new body requires new goals, new drives, new urges right? Not to mention new thoughts and emotions. Our hero is very definitely not grateful for his transcendence.

Simak had a fondness for time travel and “Small Deer”, set in a geologically accurate version of Wisconsin’s past, is a fine example. It’s a tale of a mechanical genius and his idiot savant friend building a time machine to watch the dinosaurs.

Simak’s “Gleaners”, from 1960, seems partially an answer to T. L. Sherred’s famous “E for Effort” from 1947. The latter story imagined the documentation of the historical past made possible with time travel causing international chaos when cherished historical myths are overthrown. Spencer, the protagonist of Simak’s story, specifically rejects the notion that his time travel agency, publically chartered Past, Inc, is going to undertake a similar project with religion. What it does do is retrieve lost artifacts and genealogical research for wealthy patrons. But political pressure is starting to be brought to bear to change that policy. There are also nice asides on the psychological toil on Past, Inc’s temporal agents as they spend years in the future, with no ties beyond vacations, to their home time.

“Ogre” with its sentient, musical plants, a possible plot to subvert human civilization, and an annoying, rules spouting robot accountant was also a standout story. I’m usually a sucker for “vegetable civilization” stories.

The collection has an example of one of Simak’s western stories too.

Open Road Media is not collecting Simak’s stories in the order they appeared which is probably a good thing. ( )

For me, Clifford D. Simak was mainly the author of two classics novels, “Way Station” and “City”, two books I read and loved many years ago when I started reading science fiction. And I must confess that I had no idea until recently that he also wrote plenty of stories.
This first volume of his complete short fiction has left me wondering, because if the tales compiled in this volume are really a representative sample of the quality of the rest of his short fiction, I can’t understand why his stories are not much better known, because I found that the ten stories compiled in this volume were powerful, interesting, well- written, surprising, sometimes moving, sometimes philosophical… and most of them have aged really well. So much so, that I even included "I Had No Head and My Eyes Were Floating Away Up In the Air" in my Hugo nominating ballot.
If the rest of the books in this series are as good as this one, we must congratulate Open Road and ourselves, because this is a terrific initiative. Looking forward to the rest of the volumes! ( )