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Clifford D. Simak
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 Clifford D. Simak was one of the finest modern sf writers. Beginning his career with slam-bang
intergalactic adventures in the 1930s, he became one of the most polished, sophisticated, and humane of the writers
of Campbell's Golden Age in the 1940s. Algis Budrys has called him "the most charming of John W.
Campbell's writers." He remained one of the most popular and respected writers in the field, publishing many
award-winning stories and novels for the next fifty years, until his death in the late 1980s. Robert A. Heinlein,
an admirer of his work, presented an encomium on the occasion of Simak's being named a Grand Master by
the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1976. His notable novels include
Ring Around the Sun (1953); Time &
Again (1951); Way Station (1963); The Goblin
Reservation (1968); A Choice of Gods (1972). His
most famous single book, however, is the linked collection of stories from the 1940s,
City (1952), which chronicles the future of human evolution (and that of robot intelligences, dogs, and, finally, ants) through incidents in
the future history of one family, its robot servants, its dogs.
This story cycle is a revered classic of the field, and represents a literary form which was arguably
the dominant long form in the genre, at least from Ray Bradbury's
The Martian Chronicles (1951) to Robert Silverberg's
The World Inside (1971) or Thomas M. Disch's
334 (1972), between the primacy of the
magazine serial (the novel in parts) of the 1930s and 40s (which had no other market until the paperbacks and small
press reprints of the 1950s) and the full-scale novel of science fiction, which became dominant in the
1970s after twenty years of literary evolution, mainly in the form of paperback original novels expanded from
magazine novellas (or combining novellas). "Desertion" ("than which there is not much better in the entire
Modern Science Fiction canon" -- Algis Budrys) is an episode from
City.
The idea of shape-shifting is very old in folklore, and beguiling, but combining it with the superiority
of an alien consciousness in an alien form lends it a new and science fictional seduction. Simak invented a
new mode of transcendence for the human mind and spirit in this story that, once experienced, is so nearly
impossible to reject that humanity cannot. This is an elegy.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
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Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.