Clifford D. Simak
The Creator and Other Stories
Introduction
This is the sixth collection of the short stories of Clifford D. Simak that I have had the privilege and pleasure of editing. The pleasure lies in being able to reveal the stories to the modern science fiction audience. Some of these tales have been included in collections assembled by Cliff himself or by others, but those collections (which I myself in my time eagerly bought) are now not available. Some tales are from my own library, some are mined from the magazines through the assistance of Joyce Day of the Science Fiction Foundation (to whom UK sf lovers should be grateful), and others have come from the considerable collection of a fellow-enthusiast here in Aberdeen. To him I owe a considerable debt.
The privilege lies in being able to work with the stories of one of my favourite authors. I well remember the trepidation with which I first wrote to CDS, the courtesy of his reply, and then meeting for breakfast in Hopkins House Motor Hotel in Minnetonka/Minneapolis in 1981. I was nervous and he was (I think) slightly anxious lest he had made a mistake in allowing access to this Scottish academic lawyer. But we got on welclass="underline" our interests and enthusiasms meshed — so did our dislikes. He bore me off to his house and I still recall asking if the Way Station had anything to do with Andrew Wyeth's painting 'Christina's World' and the joy with which Cliff dug out from a pile of books on the coffee table in front of us an album of Wyeth's paintings. It was indeed so: Way Station is not unconnected with that weatherbeaten-grey slatted house on the rise above the meadow.
We corresponded for the rest of Cliff's life, with all the affection of shared interest and enjoyment. I still cannot bring myself to erase from my computer disc the letter I wrote on 26 April 1988, speaking of the spring: two days later a colleague asked if I had seen word of Cliff's death. Cliff must have died as I was writing. The news was carried in the Press and Journal, a newspaper circulating in the northern half of Scotland, and a full obituary ran in the London Times (a courtesy extended first to James Blish in 1975 and two weeks after Cliff to Robert Heinlein).
Like others I grieved for the passing of one whose niche in sf is unique, and the flavour of whose tales has never been approached. Indeed, the Simak style has never been successfully emulated. Not for nothing has he been termed the pastoral poet of sf. His voice, his way of looking at things and the quiet sanity and morality of even his most abstruse flights of fancy, were unique in his lifetime. Modern sf would be the healthier were someone filling his shoes, but, though there is some promise, I see no true successor to CDS. Were justification needed — and it is not, for the tales stand on their own — that alone would justify these collections.
CDS's skill as a weaver of tales is incontrovertible. He was a newspaperman for the bulk of his long working life, yet, despite a very busy and successful professional life he published over two hundred stories and twenty-seven novels. City of 1952 and Way Station of 1963 are perhaps the best known novels. City won the International Fantasy Award in 1953 and his other awards and nominations from the sf writing and the sf reading communities include three Hugos (for The Big Front Yard', 1959; Way Station, 1964; and The Grotto of the Dancing Deer', 1980) and a Nebula (for The Grotto of the Dancing Deer', 1980 — which also won the Locus short story award for that year). In 1977 he received the Nebula Grand Master award of the Science Fiction Writers of America as well as the Jupiter Award (for A Heritage of Stars, 1977). Cliff retired in 1976, but kept on writing, his last novel being Highway of Eternity (1986). He died in April 1988.
I said CDS's skill as a weaver of tales is incontrovertible. The wording was deliberate, for it is the story not the style that usually sticks in the mind. His style is workmanlike, efficiently transmitting ideas but no more. Unlike some more modern writers, in CDS the style is not part of the experience. On the contrary, the unobtrusiveness of his writing reflects his professional training and serves to enhance the ideas he offers. It is the style of the story-teller of old, grasping your attention without histrionic display.
The ideas, the people and the Simak locations (often the countryside) linger in the mind. Like all good tellers of tales, one forgets the precise words, but the flavour of the story persists. In Tolkein's terms the story becomes myth, for the story remains while its precise formulation in words vanishes.
Practice alone will not produce good stories which so transcend their immediate vehicle. A basic skill is needed, though that is a skill which itself needs to be honed by frequent practice. Cliff was always thinking of stories — in his last letter to me he spoke of regret that he had not the strength to write, but he was enjoying thinking of fresh stories. He had done that from an early age, his brother Carson often being the audience.
CDS was formed by his early life in the rural communities of south-west Wisconsin. He was born on the ridge country of Millville township above the Wisconsin river. He was reared on his father's farm there, and the 'stone house' his father built still gazes over to Prairie du Chien. He was educated in Patch Grove, and taught school for a few years in other small communities in the neighbourhood. All that grounded his country of the imagination, 'Simak Country', which is as real as the inventions of others. I have gone over this ground, guided by friends, by Cliff's instruction and by his brother Carson, and it is startling and instructive to recognise some scenes precisely as delineated, and in others to see how the artist has shifted and shaped to his requirements. In this collection, The Thing in the Stone' is embedded m the Platteville Limestone of Simak coutry, and Cat Den
Point and the tree to the cave, although moved laterally, are features of the Simak farm.
Simak country is also the people that live there. Not for nothing does Daniel find his place in a rural community as he flees 'All the Traps of Earth'. Nor is it an accident that those who know The Answers' live simply. The caring and an underlying respect for traditional ways and moral values which suffuse most of the stories can be traced to rural community life. On the other hand the raw evil that can also lurk in the country community is also known and exposed in, for example, the Adams family in The Thing in the Stone'. And, from a different side — Cliffs long interest in government — there is Brown and Russell in 'Party Line'.
One reads stories for different reasons. In this collection I have tried to provide a representative 'buffet' for various tastes and requirements. For fun try 'Reunion on Ganymede' and The Money Tree'. For relaxation: try 'All the Traps of Earth'. But, having made my selection, I am conscious that most of the stories here touch something deeper. Cliff usually has a secondary (or primary, but concealed) element, an interest which he approaches most fully in the novels A Choice of Gods and Project Pope. There is a questioning and a probing of fundamental matters — What is it all about? and, What am I for? There is also the notion of some higher power, being or purpose. Theologically these are the questions of the nature of existence together with the sense of the numinous, but CDS presents them in story form — a medium which can often be more illuminating than the tomes of the professionals. Consider 'Death Scene' and The Answers' as a pair. They involve a serenity which has its own loveliness whether or not that is how you yourself would react to the facts of the story.
CDS was not always serene in his attitude to such questions. The Creator' is very different. In its time it was notorious. CDS wrote it in 1933 or '34 after he had more or less decided that his dalliance with sf was over. The editor W.L. Crawford persuaded him to write one more. It was not the first time CDS had brushed with the orthodoxies of religion (see The Voice in the Void' of 1932), but this presentation of God as a none too pleasant experimental scientist eventually killed by his creation was, for its time, startling. And, though it bears the stamp of its era, and though it is a product of a young writer, it stands as a stimulus to thought even today.