Customer Reviews

Best of Clifford D.Simak

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Clifford D. Simak, although perhaps not as well known as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, was a true grandmaster of science fiction, winning numerous awards including several Hugos and Nebulas. His works "City," "The Big Front Yard" and "Way Station" are enduring classics of the genre.

This Kindle anthology does not include any of Simak's best works, but everything here is worth reading, and you get a lot for $1.99-- one full-length novel and four shorter pieces.

The full novel is "Empire," one of Simak's first novels (1951). It is the story of an ambitious industrialist who tries to leverage his monopoly over power generation to become dictator of the solar system, and two plucky young scientists who invent an alternative energy source and try to bring freedom to the planets. The book starts out with political and business machinations, but about a third of the way in the heroes and the villain take to their respective space ships and the rest of the book is pure space opera as they battle each other with various power rays. It is an exciting read, but lacks the subtlety of Simak's later books.

"Hellhounds of the Cosmos" is one of Simak's earliest published stories (1932). The scientific premise is deliriously silly, even for the pre-John Campbell age (somehow mixing up the theory of evolution with the idea of a 4th dimension), but the story is an effective piece of pulp adventure.

"The Street that Wasn't There" (1941), co-authored with Carl Jacobi, is a genuinely strange work, questioning the objective nature of reality-- if other people stop believing that your street exists, can you still walk down it?

"Project Mastodon" (1955) is an entertaining novellette, dealing with the time travel theme that Simak turned to so often in his mature works.

Finally, "The World That Couldn't Be" (1958) is a truly excellent story, both a fascinating exploration of exobiology and a clever satire on colonialism.

The book is well-formatted for the Kindle, with a linked table of contents and few to no typos.

I have been reading Simak since I was a kid, and this isn't a "best of". The majority of his stories are out of print and good luck finding them. It's too bad, because he had some real gems out there. Just not this collection.