Clifford D. Simak Books In Order

Empire

Who controls power controls the Solar System, and Interplanetary Power, through its power accumulators controls power. Spencer Chambers, the president of Interplanetary Power, used that control to rule the Solar System with an iron thumb that allowed no dissent. When Russell Page and his friend Harry Wilson develop and alternative source of power they find themselves drawn into a conflict that will decide the fate of the system, and whether man will live in freedom or as slaves. Will they succeed, or will Interplanetary Power keep its Empire? with Includes Hellhounds of the Cosmos – When the Earth is threatened by beings from another dimension an army of ninety-nine brave men enters the fourth dimension to battle the Hellhounds of the Cosmos!

Ring Around the Sun

This novel is set in a future world where the equipment of ordinary, everyday life has become indestructible; there are everlasting lightbulbs and infallible cars, but no one knows where they have come from.

They Walked Like Men

A Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Author

The aliens wouldn’t kill…
They’d take over earth and let man survive — if he could. A few people tried to tell that Earth was being taken over by alien beings in the shape of bowling balls, talking dogs, dolls that walked like men. The trouble was, no one believed them.

Way Station / Here Gather the Stars

Enoch Wallace survived the carnage of Gettysburg and lived through the rest of the Civil War to make it home to his parents’ farm in south west Wisconsin. But his mother was already dead and his father soon joined her in the tiny family cemetery. It was then that Enoch met the being he called Ulysses and the farm became a way station for space travellers. Now, nearly a hundred years later, the US government is taking an interest in the seemingly immortal Enoch, and the Galactic Council, which set up the way station is threatening to tear itself apart.

The Goblin Reservation

‘First class entertainment’ The Sunday Times from a classic SF author. En route to an interplanetary research mission, a scientist is abducted by a strange, shadowy race of aliens and taken to a previously uncharted planet, a storehouse of information that would be invaluable even to an Earth so advanced that time travel allows goblins, dinosaurs, even Shakespeare to coexist.

Cemetery World

Earth: expensive, elite graveyard to the galaxy. Ravaged 10,000 years earlier by war, Earth was reclaimed by its space dwelling offspring as a planet of landscaping and tombstones. None of them fully human, Fletcher, Cynthia, and Elmer journey through this dead world, discovering human traits and undertaking a quest to rebuild a human world on Earth.

Our Children’s Children

Coming from the future, Our Children’s Children walked through holes in the air. The holes were time tunnels and down them were fleeing our after generations, escaping from an invasion of intelligent yet murderously savage aliens. From the author of ‘Ring Around the Sun’.

Enchanted Pilgrimage

A manuscript is stolen from a library and from a young man’s obstinate questions emerges an answer of stupendous import as the quest for an elder civilization becomes a terrifying ordeal. The author is a Hugo and Nebula award winner whose previous novels include ‘Off Planet’ and ‘City’.

Where the Evil Dwells

The empty Lands lay waiting empty of humans but full of sleepless malice, and harbouring one power more dreadful than anything in myth. Other titles by this award winning science fiction writer include ‘Cosmic engineers’, ‘So Bright the Vision’ and ‘Highway of Eternity’.

Highway of Eternity

It all began simply enough. A client had vanished, and Jay Corcoran went to investigate the man’s hotel suite, which seemed empty. Bot Corcoran’s trick vision spotted what no one else could see a room sized box stuck somehow to the outside wall of the suite. There was no way to get into the box, however, so Corcoran cabled his longtime pal Tom Boone in Singapore to fly to New York. Boone had a talent. When threatened, he could ‘step around a corner’ into some otherwhere until the danger passed. Maybe he could step around a corner into the box. The box turned out to be a time traveler machine that transported them almost instantly back to 1745 in Shropshire, England, where they found a strange family of refugees from a million years in the future. There, in the far future, the alien Infinites were converting humanity to incorporeal form, promising that would give them immortality. When the family refused conversion, they had been forced to flee in their time travelers. Now, for more than a century they had lain hidden in their time bubble around Hopkins Acre. But they had reports of something sniffing at the bubble. The, suddenly, the Infinites’ killer monster broke through. After that, things grew complicated as they fled to the distant past and the farther future.

Hellhounds of the Cosmos

Clifford D. Simak spent most of his professional career working in Minnesota for the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, but nowadays he’s remembered mostly for his science fiction writing novels like Mastodonia 1978, The Visitors 1980, Project Pope 1981, Where the Evil Dwells 1982, Special Deliverance 1982, Highway of Eternity 1986. But Simak had a long, long career as witness this story, which first saw print in 1932, when Simak was 28. You can see that Simak grew a great deal as a writer over his lifetime or perhaps the original editor had at it a bit too roughly with his blue pencil. But even so it’s Simak, and it’s got a quality that rises over that…

Project Mastodon

The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Fiction / Science Fiction / General; Fiction / Fantasy / General; Fiction / Fantasy / Contemporary; Fiction / Action

Spacebred Generations

When a generation ship that’s traveled for a thousand years suddenly stops, one man, the lone ‘sinner’ who can read books, must risk his life to complete the mission. A thrilling space adventure from the author of ‘Way Station,’ ‘City,’ and ‘Mastodonia.’

City

The cities of the world are deserted and automation has invaded every aspect of human life. The robots make spaceships, the ants create huge buildings on the remains of old towns and the dogs take over the earth. The award winning author’s many other novels include ‘Catface’ and ‘Off Planet’.

Best Science Fiction Stories of Clifford D. Simak

This Halcyon Classics ebook contains five works by 20th century science fiction writer Clifford Donald Simak. Simak 1904 1988 wrote during the pulp era and during the Golden Age of Science Fiction, achieving a following for his stories based on super science and what he called ‘realistic fiction.’During his career, Simak received three Hugo awards and one Nebula award, and was named the third Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1977. This ebook includes an active table of contents for easy navigation. EmpireHellhounds of the CosmosProject MastodonThe Street that Wasn t ThereThe World that Couldn’t BeThis unexpurgated edition contains the complete text, with minor errors and omissions corrected.

Over the River and Through the Woods

Classic stories of science fiction by this Nebula Grandmaster award winner. TABLE OF CONTENTS: Contents: A Death in the House The Big Front Yard Goodnight Mr. James Dusty Zebra Neighbor Over the River & Through the Woods Construction Shack Grotto of the Dancing Deer BACK COVER:…
he wrote for so long and always so well that his excellence came to be taken for granted, as we take sunlight for granted until we go blind. Poul Anderson I read Cliff’s stories with particular attention, and I couldn’t help but notice the simplicity and directness of the writing the utter clarity of it. I made up my mind to imitate it, and I labored over the years to make my writing simpler, clearer, more uncluttered, to present my scenes on a bare stage. Isaac Asimov Without Simak, science fiction would have been without its most humane element, its most humane spokesman for the wisdom of the ordinary person and the value of life lived close to the land. James Gunn Good fantasy and that includes science fiction takes off from the known for its flights into the new. Cliff Simak was a master of the art. His known was the rural Midwest that he loved. His new could reach to the ends of space and time, but never beyond reality. Even his cosmic aliens always had half human dimensions that made them believable. I loved him, as so many did, for his unfailing warmth and a wit that was keen but never cruel. I heard from him often during the painful time after his wife’s death. His own death touched me deeply, and I’m happy to see him remembered with this collection of his best loved stories. Jack Williamson I always loved his stories, short or long. He made me love them and the rural America of his childhood as much as he did. Lester del Rey Ten years ago it would have been inconceivable that a volume of the best stories of Clifford Simak author of the classic City would not have been published by Putnam or Del Rey, but today we have to be grateful to the one man firm of Tachyon Publications for preserving Over the River and Through the Woods, which includes some of Simak’s best stories, including two Hugo Award winners. After all, Simak is dead, which means his career is flatlined, even if Robert Heinlein said, ‘to read science fiction is to read Simak. The reader who does not like Simak stories does not like science fiction at all.’ Simak was a master of a special kind of nostalgic science fiction that reconciled the values of his youth the rural Midwest of the 1920s with the larger universe. Material that became ludicrous cliche in the hands of lesser writers all those endless flying saucers landing in the hillbilly’s back acre was by Simak handled with elegance and dignity.’A Death in the House’ is typical: A farmer finds a dying alien. He does what he can, but that’s very little. The farmer conceals the grave, wanting to give his ‘guest’ that much dignity. But the alien is plantlike. It or its young sprouts out of the corpse. Human and alien struggle toward understanding. In ‘The Big Front Yard,’ a rural handyman finds his house transformed into a gateway to other worlds. The common people have the good sense; trouble starts when profiteers and the government get involved. The tone is light, friendly and clever. This is not to suggest that Simak was a writer with no hard edges. ‘Good Night Mr. James’ is a horror story, about a duplicate human being created to destroy a particularly nasty alien illegally smuggled to Earth. But the gentler mode was more typical, and he could also write humor. ‘Dusty Zebra’ is a long technological joke, maybe a bit slight to be included when a 50 year career must be distilled into 218 pages. Simak’s last story, the last in the book, ‘The Grotto of the Dancing Deer,’ is about an immortal caveman, quite different from de Camp’s ‘Gnarly Man.’ He is the original artist who painted that cave art the scientists keep finding; after all this time, he just has to tell someone. The story won both the Hugo and the Nebula for 1980, because both readers and fellow professionals wanted to say ‘thank you.’ The Washington Post Book World Clifford D. Simak is another classic SF writer who staked out a distinctive territory based on his rural midwestern roots only a couple hundred miles north of Bradbury’s but he never strayed very far from a few classic SF themes which he treated with considerably more rigor than Bradbury, if sometimes with as much sentimentality. Simak’s City is at least as important to the history of SF as Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles some would say more so, given its more challenging conceptual framework and his other short stories are among the most enduring in the genre, as Over the River & Through the Woods, a new limited edition from Tachyon Publications, attests. Yet Simak, like Sturgeon, seems in danger of fading into the limbo of historical anthologies; while his work was once as widely available as that of any of the giants, today these stories seem almost like new discoveries and are just as fresh. Part of the reason may be not that Simak’s folksy language seems to belie the underlying sense of alienation and tragedy that characterizes much of his work; part may be due to the rediscovery of American regional idioms among younger SF writers from Terry Bisson to Nancy Kress…
Over the River & Through the Woods contains eight Simak stories from 1951 through 1980 which means it includes none of the classic stories like ‘Desertion’ or ‘Huddling Place’, which later went to make up City, but does include his late Hugo and Nebula winning masterpiece ‘The Grotto of the Dancing Deer’ and the Hugo winning ‘The Big Front Yard.’ One of the first things that comes to mind when rereading the latter story after several years it concerns a characteristically laconic farmer with a dog named Towser the only name Simak seems to have permitted for dogs who finds on his property a gateway to distant worlds is that few contemporary writers would have let such a simple and elegant premise be confined to a novella. Simak’s focus is on the unimpressed rustic whose very lack of response to the wonder at his doorstep intensifies our own. When a rustic is impressed by an alien presence, such as in ‘A Death in the House,’ it is less likely to be from a sense of wonder than from a sense of companionship. Simak’s roots may be firmly in SF, but he writes of alien encounters in a way Willa Cather might have written of them. Aliens are strange but unthreatening, and in some cases as in ‘Neighbor’ they can turn the entire neighborhood into a pastoral Shangri la, isolated from the outside in a way that encapsulates what must be Simak’s own drams of lost innocence. But Simak could write about more than wonderful things happening to remote farmers. ‘Good Night, Mr. James’ is a very early treatment 1951 of what we would today call a cloning story, done with the kind of cynical humor that is needed for what is essentially a double and triple cross tale. It reveals Simak’s healthy streak of humor, as does ‘Dusty Zebra,’ in which trivial objects are zapped into another dimension in return for high tech wonders. ‘Construction Shack’ ironically explores an almost Stapledonian notion of whole solar systems being engineered by ancient aliens Pluto is the construction shack of the title, cast in terms of the matter of fact space jockeys so familiar from pulp SF. Simak may be at his best, however, when his theme is isolation and abandonment. The title story concerns children from the future sent back to the refuge of the 1890s. The best tale in the collection and one of the high points of Simak’s late career, ‘The Grotto of the Dancing Deer,’ concerns an anthropologist who comes to realize that his assistant seems to know far too much about certain ancient cave paintings, and may in fact have been their creator. Simak’s evocation, in a few pages, of the sheer loneliness of immortality and the daunting perspectives of time involved, again could be a lesson to a generation of younger writers, and reminds us brilliantly of what Simak was capable of. Locus When the Science Fiction Writer’s of America began bestowing their Grand Master awards, the third writer so honored was Clifford D. Simak 1904 1988 Only Robert A. Heinlein and Jack Williamson preceeded him, and he received his award before such luminaries as Fritz Leiber, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury. He earned this distinction by producing, over a long period of time, a significant body of popular, respected, often award winning work, including his classic books City and Way Station, and many shorter works, eight of which are contained in this welcome collection. Readers unfamiliar with Simak who are willing to give this book a chance are in for a treat. More than half of the stories here were among the best stories of their respective years. ‘The Big Front Yard’ 1958 won a Hugo. ‘A Death in the House’ 1959 was selected by Judith Merril for Year’s Best SF: Fifth Annual Edition. ‘Over the River and Through the Woods‘ 1965 made the cut for World’s Best Science Fiction: 1966 edited by Donald Woll

Off-Planet

A collection of seven science fiction short stories, all located ‘off planet’. The book includes a special introduction from the editor, Francis Lyall. The author’s many science fiction titles include ‘Cosmic Engineers’, ‘So Bright the Vision’ and ‘Where Evil Dwells’.

Immigrant and Other Stories

A collection of seven science fiction stories by an author who won a Nebula and three Hugo awards and received the Nebula Grand Master award in 1977. The stories are ‘The Immigrant’, ‘Green Thumb’, ‘Small Deer’, ‘The Ghost of a Model T’, ‘Byte Your Tongue’, ‘I Am Crying All Inside’ and ‘Neighbour’.

The Creator and Other Stories

A collection of short tales by the author of City and Grotto of the Dancing Deer includes the title story, in which God is depicted as an experimental scientist killed by his own creation, and others.

The Civilisation Game and Other Stories

This seventh collection to be assembled by the editor Francis Lyall, is mainly to show Clifford D. Simak’s early use of ideas that fascinated him, and, with one exception, bring together stories which have been unavailable since they were first published. Long distinguished from his peers for the sceptical view he offered readers of the wonders of advanced technology, late American author Clifford D. Simak 1904 1988 was as famous for his short stories as his novels. Winner of the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America, he also won an International Fantasy Award in 1953 for one of his best known titles, City, as well as Nebula and Locus Awards for Grotto of the Dancing Deer, in 1982.

The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories

This is the definitive collection of the twentieth century’s most characteristic genre science fiction. The tales are organized chronologically to give readers a sense of how the genre’s range, vitality, and literary quality have evolved over time. Each tale offers a unique vision, an altered reality, a universe all its own. Readers can sample H.G. Well’s 1903 story ‘The Land Ironclads’ which predicted the stalemate of trench warfare and the invention of the tank, Jack Williamson’s ‘The Metal Man,’ a rarely anthologized gem written in 1928, Clifford D. Simak’s 1940s classic, ‘Desertion,’ set on ‘the howling maelstrom that was Jupiter,’ Frederik Pohl’s 1955 ‘The Tunnel Under the World’ with its gripping first line, ‘On the morning of June 15th, Guy Burckhardt woke up screaming out of a dream’, right up to the current crop of writers, such as cyberpunks Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, whose 1982 story ‘Burning Chrome’ foreshadows the idea of virtual reality, and David Brin’s ‘Piecework,’ written in 1990. In addition, Shippey provides an informative Introduction, examining the history of the genre, its major themes, and its literary techniques.

More Fantastic Stories

Collected her are Six Fantastic science fiction stories by R. A. Lafferty, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Clifford D. Simak, Edgar Pangborn, Andre Norton, and Frank Herbert. Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas The place called Sodom was bad enough. But right down the road was the other town and that was even worse! The Worlds of If Dixon Wells, a fashionable playboy, is always late. What will it cost him this time. The Street That Wasn’t There Jonathon Chambers went for a walk at the same time every day for twenty years. But this time when he got home nothing seemed quite right. The Good Neighbors You can’t blame an alien for a little inconvenience as long as he makes up for it! The Gifts of Asti She was the guardian of the worlds, but HER world was dead. Operation Haystack It’s hard to ferret out a gang of fanatics; it would, obviously, be even harder to spot a genetic line of dedicated men. But the problem Orne had was one step tougher than that!

The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction

The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction features over a 150 years’ worth of the best science fiction ever collected in a single volume. The fifty two stories and critical introductions are organized chronologically as well as thematically for classroom use. Filled with luminous ideas, otherworldly adventures, and startling futuristic speculations, these stories will appeal to all readers as they chart the emergence and evolution of science fiction as a modern literary genre. They also provide a fascinating look at how our Western technoculture has imaginatively expressed its hopes and fears from the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century to the digital age of today. A free online teacher’s guide at www. wesleyan. edu/wespress/sfanthologyguide accompanies the anthology and offers access to a host of pedagogical aids for using this book in an academic setting. The stories in this anthology have been selected and introduced by the editors of Science Fiction Studies, the world’s most respected journal for the critical study of science fiction.

Startling Stories #3

Welcome to the latest and greatest issue of STARTLING STORIES! This long awaited issue is jam packed with action and adventure. Featuring classic pulp fiction, with the original illustrations, by Raymond F. Jones, Arthur J. Burks, Clifford D. Simak, James H. Schmitz, and Raymond Z. Gallun from the Golden Age of Science Fiction. We are also pleased to feature new fiction by Robert Morganbesser, S. Clayton Rhodes, John L. French, Don Hutchison, and K.G. McAbee, all of whom have written some new tales that will entertain and surprise you! They are some of the new Fictioneers that Wild Cat Books is proud to work with, and we’re sure you’ll enjoy them. We also feature the newest installment of famed artist Ron Wilber’s comic book hero*ine ‘Saucy Blaine’, and for good measure we have also included a comic reprint of ‘Tom Corbett, Space Cadet’! Add to this mix our usual Retro Reviews of Popular Culture, and this is an issue you won’t want to miss! Edited and Designed by William Carney, this is a magazine that all Sci Fi and Fantasy fans will want on their bookshelf!