Guest Post | Clifford D Simak: The Beginnings of a Master

By GW Thomas

Clifford D Simak (1904-1988) had a writing career that ran for fifty-five years. He was one of the early SF writers who could adapt to changes brought about by John W Campbell at Astounding. The stories listed here are his early works before this transformation. Usually I lament the Campbell revolution (or at least oppose the snobbery that came of it), but in the case of Simak, I would agree that these early stories are not even close to what he would achieve later. These 1931-32 stories include four stories for Hugo Gernsback at Wonder and one for Harry Bates at the Clayton Astounding. After 1932, Cliff took a three year break, writing one tale for the short-lived semi-prozine Marvel Tales before taking another three year break. The new Simak emerges with this last tale that tackles religion head-on. When he returned in 1938, it was with "Rule 18" for John W Campbell. The old Simak was gone forever.

"The World of the Red Sun" (Wonder Stories, December 1931) was Simak's debut as one of Hugo Gernsback's growing stable of new writers. The story takes two time travelers, Harl Swanson and Bill Kressman, to Denver millions of years in the future. There they find the human race reduced to savages by a weird being calling himself Golan-Kirt. This entity from Out of the Cosmos can kill men with his mind. In an Edgar Rice Burroughs-style arena scene, the travelers take on Golan-Kirt armed only with their .45s and the knowledge that he kills with illusions. (The creature claims to be from space, but the travelers figure it is actually a mutated scientist from a scenario like that in Edmond Hamilton's "The Man Who Evolved" [Wonder Stories, April 1931]). The humans win the mental battle by ridiculing the monster; laughing at him (shades of Star Trek!). What might have been a happy Burroughsian ending turns sour though when the men try to return to their own time. Isaac Asimov noted the story in his anthology Before the Golden Age, because Simak wrote in a plain workman-like style, differing from many of the others in Gernsback's magazines, and because of the downer ending: one still mimicked in the final moments of films like The Planet of the Apes decades later.

"The Voice in the Void" (Wonder Stories Quarterly, Spring 1932) has Simak poking at religion for the first time, a theme he would tackle again and again in stories like "The Creator" (mentioned below) and in novels like Project Pope (1981). Two adventurers, Ashby and Smith, take on the Holy of Martian Holies when they steal the bones of Kell-Rabin. The Martians hunt the fugitives down and even place Smith's brain in a tube, a form of immortality. Ashby escapes with the tube as well as another - containing a Martian priest - and hides in the desert. There the three (one man and two tubes) discover an ancient pyramid from a religion that predated Kell-Rabin. Inside, Ashby finds an immense treasure and the means to exact his revenge: a vengeance that gives the story its title. Simak once again ends on a sour, ironic note, but does reveal the mystery that drives the entire story: What is in the coffin of Kell-Rabin?

Stories using amputated brains began as early as MH Hasta's "The Talking Brain" in Amazing Stories, August 1926, but really take off after Edmond Hamilton's "The Comet Doom" (Amazing Stories, January 1928), inspiring HP Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in Darkness" (Weird Tales, August 1931), Hawk Carse's disembodied scientists in "The Affair of the Brains" (Astounding, March 1932) by Anthony Gilmore, Eando Binder's oft-reprinted "Enslaved Brains" (Wonder Stories, July-September 1934), and the classic novel Donovan's Brain (1942) by Curt Siodmak.

"Mutiny on Mercury" (Wonder Stories, March 1932) is the high-point of the early Simak. In this story, he describes a Martian rebellion from the point of view of an Earthman in a domed space station on Mercury. Besides writing a good action adventure, Simak describes the dangerous existence on the first planet along the strip between the hot and dark side: the only place living things can survive. When the Martians and their Moon Men stooges destroy the airlock on one of the domed stations, the author gets to tell what losing an atmosphere from a spaceport would be like. Simak does a great job of creating a Solar System of varied humanoids, like Leigh Brackett would do later in her Interplanetary mythos. Simak finishes the story with a space-flyer battle worthy of Edmond Hamilton. The only criticism I have of the story is its out-of-date (even for 1932) Imperialism. The Martians and other aliens are presented as inferior and conniving, but it is hard to identify with a race of men who would subjugate such people.

"Hellhounds of the Cosmos" (Astounding, June 1932) almost feels like a regression after "Mutiny on Mercury." Some of this may be the fact that Simak was writing for Harry Bates instead of Hugo Gernsback. The tale begins like so many others at the Clayton Astounding: a world under attack by alien invaders. Here Simak deviates from the usual story of a brave young scientist who saves the world (and a pretty girl) with an invention. His hero is a newspaperman, Henry Woods, who visits a scientist, Dr. Silas White, and discovers that the black terrors that have been attacking the world are creatures from the fourth dimension. Simak gives a rather convoluted explanation for how these creatures are actually less evolved than the beings in our three dimensional world. All goobley-gook aside, Dr White invents a machine that will translate humans into the fourth dimension to strike back at the invaders. Ninety-nine men go into the weird light, including our newspaper reporter, to find that in the other dimension they form a singular creature, named Mal Shaff. This weird brute has a knock-down fight with another monster named Ouglat, amidst a world of steel cliffs and red skies. Mal Shaff begins to lose because Ouglat is growing bigger. The invaders have been recalled from Earth and grow Ouglat to mammoth size. Dr. White saves Mal Shaff by sending in the Marines, allowing Mal Shaff to destroy his opponent. Once victorious, other fourth dimensional creatures invite Mal Shaff to stay and none of the men who went across ever come back. Simak, master of the downer ending, strikes again! How un-Astounding!

What I found most interesting about this story was comparing it to the horror fiction of Frank Belknap Long. His province of other-dimensional monsters can be seen in stories like "The Space Eaters" (Weird Tales, July 1928), "The Horror From the Hills" (Weird Tales, January-March1931), and especially "The Hounds of Tindalos" (Weird Tales, March 1929). Long's Cthulhu Mythos horror fiction centers on weird other-dimensions, attempting to create a Lovecraftian frisson of terror. Simak (who was probably familiar with Long's work) tries for something more SF and less horror, but it is certainly his closest to a horror tale in these early stories.

"Asteroid of Gold" (Wonder Stories, November 1932) has the Drake brothers mining a gold-rich asteroid when space pirates capture them. The leader of the pirates, the notorious Max Robinson, devises a cruel torture for the two. He places their ship on the twin of the asteroid, another rock revolving just out of reach, and leaves the two men only three air bottles. Max glories in the idea of the two close brothers fighting for that last canister of air. The Drakes settle down to die with dignity, but chance intervenes. A meteor hits the Twin, causing it to fly towards the asteroid. A desperate race begins, with the men leaping from rock to rock (seen in the illo) in an attempt to avoid being crushed. The plot almost feels like a Campbell puzzle story (like Asimov's "Marooned Off Vesta"), where the two men would have used the third tank to propel them through space to the Twin. This doesn't happen, but some Age of Wonder action and excitement does instead. If Simak had written this ten years later, it would have been a much different ending.

"The Creator" (Marvel Tales, March-April 1935) marks the final days of Simak's first apprenticeship. As F Lyall points out in The Creator and Other Stories (1993):

CDS was not always serene in his attitude to such questions [religious matters]. "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 WL Crawford persuaded him to write one more... 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.

The plot of "The Creator" has two scientists, Scott Marston and Peter Sands, discover time- and space-travel through a combination of machinery, mediation, and dreams. One vision in particular is of a vast laboratory. When they finally transfer their physical bodies there, they meet the Creator, a being of glowing light. The Creator introduces them to three other time travelers from other worlds. He also shows them our universe, a mushy grey thing that the Creator made, then injected with life. When the men discover that the Creator is working on a method of destroying all matter and eradicate our universe completely, they join up with the other aliens and defy their master. Using a machine constructed by one of the other travelers (an alien that looks something like a stick bug), the time travelers flee with the universe in a bubble of purple force field. The Creator tries to destroy them, but is himself destroyed. The creatures from the universe have killed their god. When Marston and Sands return to Earth, something goes wrong and they end up lost in time.

Looking at the story, we can see that Simak has rewritten "The World of the Red Sun." He spends more time in explaining the time machine and its creation, but ultimately it is the same tale. Instead of Golan-Kirt, we have the Creator; instead of two men defeating him, we have five time travelers of different races. Again, there's the suggestion that the Creator is himself a lab experiment from some other, higher being, and finally, there's the unhappy ending with the humans lost in time. If Simak was leaving SF for good, perhaps he felt that repeating himself, enlarging on and improving his first effort, was not a bad way to finish off where he had begun.

The early parts of the story are quite Lovecraftian, similar in idea to HPL's "Beyond the Walls of Sleep," but like with "Hellhounds of the Cosmos," Simak doesn't use the device to produce creepy thrills. Instead, it's an SF means to tell his story. He would later in his career give a nod to Lovecraft in “The Call From Beyond” and in the episodic fantasy novel Where the Evil Dwells (1982), when the adventurers enter a temple inhabited by other dimensional monsters right out of Arkham. Perhaps in 1934, he had contemplated joining the Weirdies in Mythos-building and remembered that time fondly fifty years later.

All the stories mentioned above are worthy of reading, but when I look at them critically I see that most could be changed to ordinary adventure stories quite easily. "The Voice in the Void" could be a desert adventure with Arabs, "Mutiny on Mercury": an airplane adventure; "Asteroid of Gold": a pirate yarn. Despite these connections to other forms of pulp writing, Simak does play with some big SF ideas. His time travel story "The World of the Red Sun" throws off big ideas a little too quickly, never really developing some of them. Here was a young writer excited about all the possible stories to tell. But by 1935, Simak was dissatisfied with the field. As Lyall wrote, he "more or less decided that his dalliance with sf was over" and he was moving on. It took John W Campbell and Astounding Science Fiction to change Cliff's mind. With SF going in a new direction, Simak joined the ranks of Asimov, Heinlein, de Camp, and others in pushing SF forward. A necessary evolution, I suppose, but I have a fondness for these early stories. They spark with the possibilities of what is to come. Clifford D Simak was one of those early torchbearers and we can only thank him for all the great stories he wrote.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

The Call from Beyond: HP Lovecraft and Clifford D Simak [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

HP Lovecraft shows up in the darnedest places. His influence is obvious in Weird Tales, but outside that magazine you had to look harder in 1950. Arkham House published Lovecraft in hard cover, but in the world of science fiction, a genre now dominated by gears and the scientific ideas of John W Campbell, HPL and cosmic horror were of little interest. But there was at least one exception...

Clifford D Simak is probably best remembered for City (1954), a series of interconnected short stories that form a kind of novel. In that book, humans migrate into space, leaving the planet to the dogs, who remember us vaguely as gods. Simak also has a lonely robot left behind and a race of intelligent ants. CDS tells it all with subtlety, wit, and pathos. He is best know for his love of ordinary people, rural settings, and human foibles. It is this predominate trend that named him the Pastoral Poet of Science Fiction. About as un-Lovecraftian as you can get...

We have to remember something about these two authors. They were very much contemporaries. HP Lovecraft wrote for Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories ("The Colour Out of Space, March 1927). Clifford Simak started writing SF in 1931 for Gernsback's Wonder Stories. Simak gave up on SF in 1935 and only returned in 1938 when John W Campbell took over at Astounding. Lovecraft died in 1937, and so missed the changes that came to SF. Both the early Simak and the more SF Lovecraft, like "At the Mountains of Madness" (Astounding, February 1936) and "A Shadow Out of Time" (Astounding Stories, June 1936) belong to this earlier era of Age of Wonder Science Fiction. Simak could have forgotten all about those days, but...

The May 1950 issue of Super Science Stories has a Simak story called "The Call From Beyond." The very title rings of Lovecraft's "From Beyond" and "The Call of Cthulhu." In this tale, a mutant named West, fleeing an Earth pogrom, comes to a moon of Pluto to find Louis Nevin, a missing scientist who is drinking himself to death as his gigantic pyramid of empties proves. Before he dies, he hints to West that a mystery lies on Pluto, in the old station supposedly abandoned and invaded by weird forces. The planet has been banned and is guarded by the space patrol because a group of scientists had been working there on several projects, including a miracle hormone that would expand human ability, and research for an interstellar drive that leads to contact with a dimensional terror so great the government of Earth must guard everyone from it. West takes Nevin's weird pet, Annabelle, and sneaks past the patrol.

On the planet, in the old base, West finds three survivors: Henderson, Cartwright, and Belden, who do little but talk in riddles about an enchanting painting and strange visitors, as well as the freakish woman-like alien called the White Singer:

A woman had appeared in the doorway, a woman with violet eyes and platinum hair and wrapped in an ermine opera cloak. She moved forward and the light from the flaring tapers fell across her face. West stiffened at the sight, felt the blood run cold as ice within his veins. For the face was not a woman’s face. It was like a furry skull, like a moth’s face that had attempted to turn human and had stuck halfway.

The scientists have sent the White Singer's sister to Earth, where she is a sensation with her beautiful but eerie voice...

The three scientists accept West, because he has Nevin's pet. They think he is in the know about their secret. They also hope that West can help them find Nevin's hidden hormone, so they tolerate him, bringing him into the group of conspirators. Cartwright tells him about how the hormone was created, and how once-successful Nevin has stolen it, hidden it, and accepted exile for his crime. He had been allowed to take only his pet and one other thing of his choice: the whiskey.

West learns about their other discovery, a method for transcending dimensions. It takes a while for the newcomer to learn all this. When Belden comes to him, he tells him he knows West is a fake. The two begin to collaborate, but Henderson kills Belden, seeing him as a traitor. West shoots Henderson in the head in a Western-style shoot-out. (Simak had recently finished writing his Western fiction before 1950, but we'll look at those stories in a future piece. The Western mechanics of a gun battle were of help to the author here.)

The finale comes when Cartwright shows West the painting he had heard so much about. In a scene reminiscent of MR James' "The Mezzotint," we see Cartwright come out of the painting and die horribly. West uses his blaster to destroy the canvas and the link to the terrible Lovecraftian beings of the other dimension. The plot to take over the Earth ends there too, for the White Singer's sister was meant to be the first in a line of fifth columnists for the eldritch beings.

West takes down a bottle of whiskey from the fireplace mantle, a last remnant of the pact the scientists had: the last man to drink the others' health. West's brain screams and expands as he drinks. He has found Nevin's hidden hormone solution. In a moment (so familiar to viewers of Limitless and the drug N-Zee-Tee), West's mind expands and he clearly sees how to fix the great spaceship and its interstellar drive. He will take that vessel to the stars.

I haven't read every Simak story or novel, but I do know most of his other stuff is different than "The Call From Beyond." He obviously had a lot of fun with the Lovecraftian elements, though they made the story unsellable to John W Campbell at Astounding. Thus Super Science Stories, a crappy low-pay mag. Critical reception for "The Call from Beyond" was probably non-existent (though that could be said of most of the contents of Super Science Stories) as science fiction didn't care about Lovecraft or his Cthulhu Mythos. If anyone did comment on this story, it would most likely be dismissive or derogatory. What is more interesting is that the horror community didn't champion the tale either. I doubt they even knew about it.

In When the Fires Burn High and the Wind Is In the North: The Pastoral Science Fiction of Clifford D Simak (2006) by Robert J Ewald, the author describes the story as "another mediocre story very beautifully illustrated by Virgil Finlay." Ewald points out that the weird, other dimensional creatures resemble the Cobblies from City, and that Simak's idea of aliens' inspiring all the supernatural monsters like goblins and ghosts would be developed later in The Goblin Reservation (1967).

Still, "The Call From Beyond" wasn't the only time Simak got Lovecraftian. In his episodic novel Where Evil Dwells (1982), he has his adventurers enter an ancient temple filled with creatures older than the gods known as The Elder Ones:

Far back in that enormous space that loomed in front of them, eyes gleamed with a fiercely golden light—more eyes now than there had been before. Some great monster was purring, and the silky, deliberate purr, like the purring of a million house cats, rumbled in the air. But behind the purring, laced into the interstices of the rumbling purr, were other sounds that were as chilling as the purr—the sliding sound of writhing wigglers that had no feet to walk on, the nervous chittering of crouchers huddling in the dark, the click-clack of scampering hooves, the wheezing and the slobbering of those who waited for a feast, tucking mushroomed napkins underneath their chins, and of the drooler that hunkered somewhere with thick ropes of saliva dripping.

Despite "The Call From Beyond" being a one-off, CDS was obviously a fan of HP Lovecraft's weird cosmic terror, and its themes did find a place within Simak's larger context, though subtly. Whenever Simak wrote of aliens such as Catface in Mastodonia (1978) he tried to capture a little Lovecraftian strangeness. Simak never sank to the humans-in-green-skin kind of short hand that science fiction sometimes suffers from. In this way, Lovecraft may have had as much influence on the early Simak as John W Campbell.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Mastodonia: A Message from the Past [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Sometimes writers write messages for their future selves. A great example of one who did this was Clifford D Simak. The March 1955 Galaxy published a Simak story called "Project Mastodon." And it was a worthy time travel tale about creating new countries in time, not space. Three friends invent a primitive time machine that can make 50,000 year leaps, but find it very hard to profit by it when nobody will take them seriously. The US military treats them like a bunch of crackpots. When the men get stranded in the past after a mammoth crashes into their helicopter, they wrack their brains for someway to get back. The problem isn't the time machine, but the height. If they were to go back standing in Mastodonia they would end up under tons of earth. In the end, one man manages to get home but we have to wait to see if he can save his friends, even with the help of the military man who never lost faith that the travelers would return.

As time travel stories go, it is typical of the 1950s. No Morlocks here, only a puzzle story and a little action with sabertooths and mammoths. But buried in that story is a nugget, a time-release seed that will twenty-three years later become the novel Mastodonia. That little, almost unimportant fragment is a character named Pritchard, who is studying Law while the time machine inventors study Engineering. During a bull session on time travel, Pritchard pipes in: "If you guys ever do travel in time, you'll run up against more than you bargain for. I don't mean the climate or the terrain or the fauna, but the economics and the politics." In the scope of "Project Mastodon" this means the stuffy military men who poo-poo their suggestion of recognizing Mastodonia as a country and using it as a sanctuary in the case of a nuclear strike.

Twenty-three years come and go. The Golden Age turns into the New Wave and then into the age of Star Wars. It's 1978 and Simak gets that message from himself and thinks, "I left all the best stuff unwritten!" And so the novel Mastodonia (Catface in the UK) is penned and we see Clifford D Simak at his finest. Instead of a mere puzzle story, we get a tale about living characters. Asa Steele, a professor who has returned to the town where he grew up. Rila Elliot, a woman from Asa's past, come back into his life just as things get weird. Ben Page, the local bank manager, who becomes his business partner along with Rila. Instrumental to the story is Hiram, the simpleton who talks to Asa's dog Bowser, robins, and best of all to Catface, an alien who has been stranded in Asa's backyard for thousands of years. Unlike in "Project Mastodon," it is Catface who creates the time paths. This weird bunch, along with lawyers and publicists, establish Mastodonia and offer time paths for hunters to stalk T-Rex in his own Cretaceous period.

Simak is great for showing how time travel would bring on some big social issues (largely ignored in the earlier story). A religious coalition wants to pay Time Travel Associates to never go to the time of Jesus. The IRS sniffs around for tax income, but having established their own country, the time travelers are safe. Speculators want to go to Gold Rush areas before the big strike and skim off the easy gold. The federal government even gets in on it when they come up with the idea of sending the disadvantaged into the past to create a new, successful life (or simply to get rid of the deadbeats and criminals.) Asa is a simple man and all this is too much for him. All he craves is solitude in his own time period of Mastodonia where he and Rila will build a beautiful home. In their time country, Asa and Rila and Hiram enjoy the company of (the unfortunately named) Stiffy, an elderly mastodon. Unlike the excitement in "Project Mastodon," Stiffy doesn't strand anyone in time, but only trashes their mobile home. In fact, the novel isn't a series of spectacular action sequences involving prehistoric life (though it has a couple of good dinosaur scenes), but a story about how a man makes decisions about what he wants. This is the brilliance of the twenty-three year older novel. Simak writes science fiction, but like his contemporary Theodore Sturgeon, he has learned that good SF isn't puzzles or action scenes, but stories about people and how the SF elements affect them. You come to like these characters and wish the best for them. Simak keeps you guessing to the literal last chapter what will happen to Mastodonia.

Clifford D Simak's career ran for five decades, beginning with "The World of the Red Sun" in Wonder Stories (December 1931) to his final novel, Highway to Eternity in 1986. In those fifty-five years he wrote about time travel many times in novels like Time and Again (1951), Ring Around the Sun (1953), Time is the Simplest Thing (1961) and the short story "Grotto of the Dancing Deer" (1980), but Mastodonia is my favorite of all of his time stories, largely because it best captures this philosophy that Simak stated in one of the introductions to a book of stories:

"Overall, I have written in a quiet manner; there is little violence in my work. My focus has been on people, not on events. More often than not I have struck a hopeful note... I have, on occasions, tried to speak out for decency and compassion, for understanding, not only in the human, but in the cosmic sense. I have tried at times to place humans in perspective against the vastness of universal time and space. I have been concerned where we, as a race, may be going, and what may be our purpose in the universal scheme—if we have a purpose. In general, I believe we do, and perhaps an important one."

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.