Seekers of Tomorrow

by Sam Moskowitz

  Virtually the only redeeming feature of this novel is its denouement. In its early days, science fiction was thought of as a medium of Utopian proclamation, most often construc-tive, democratic, and hopeful in tone. When dictatorships were projected, they were inevitably held up as a "warning." Since 1939, governments of the future based on democratic principles have been all but nonexistent in science fiction gen-erally. Perhaps the pessimism created by World War II and the arrival of atomic explosives are responsible. But it is singularly notable that the "secret document," the object of the action in The Stars Like Dust, turns out to be a copy of the Constitution of the United States. When Asimov concludes, "The time for maturity has come as it once came on the planet Earth, and there will be a new kind of government, a kind that has never yet been tried in the Galaxy," he is, sadly enough, virtually the only science-fiction author in modern times to suggest it.

  His next novel, The Currents of Space (astounding science-fiction, October-December, 1952), was a far better work. Especially memorable is Big Lona, the peasant girl of the planet Fiorina, who befriends Rik, a member of the galactographic corps. Scientific originality is displayed in de-scribing the function of this corps, which measures the nature and movement of particles in space.

  Asimov now felt up to attempting a full-length novel based on robots, broaching the idea to H. L. Gold, who suggested the incorporation of a robot detective and the Malthusian outlook on overpopulation. Serialized in galaxy science-fiction, beginning in October, 1953, the novel, Caves of Steel, put Asimov in a class by himself. No one had previously succeeded so brilliantly in wedding the detective to science fiction and Asimov's carefully thought-out overpopulated me-tropolises of the future were drawn more with love than with loathing.

  Science-fiction readers offered Isaac Asimov their greatest personal tribute. They made him Guest of Honor at the 13th World Science Fiction Convention, held in Cleveland, Septem-ber 2-5, 1955. The same year he was made Associate Professor at Boston University, pursuing research in nucleic acid. The exigencies of writing made it increasingly difficult for him to do justice to either vocation. A change in deans at the University resulted in pressure on Asimov for more research and less writing. Asimov, who had already had published several books in a popular scientific vein, felt that he could be of more benefit to the university in that manner than through research. When Asimov took his post at the University the rules of the institution permitted a faculty member with a certain number of years of service to retain his title for life, even if he resigned. Those rules had been changed in the interim so that the title could be lost on departure. Asimov took the matter to a vote of the full faculty and won out, retiring to full-time writing in 1958 and holding his title of Associate Professor by lecturing several times a year. Science fiction was no longer a profitable market, so he channeled his energies into scientific articles and books writ-ten in popular language. His facility in expressing himself clearly and engagingly, which made him one of the finest lecturers in the history of Boston University, coupled with his extraordinarily retentive memory, added up to instant success as a purveyor of popular education. As many as six books a year flowed from his refer-ence-lined attic workshop: The Chemicals of Life, The Well-springs of Life, The World of Nitrogen, The World of Carbon, Inside the Atom, Building Blocks of the Universe, The Clock We Live On, The Realm of Numbers, and many others. The major opus in this area thus far is the critically acclaimed The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science, a two-volume boxed set, ambitiously aimed at familiarizing the layman with the complete range of the physical and biological sciences.

  The impact on the general public of Isaac Asimov's two-pronged writing career is apparent to no one more than brother Stanley Asimov, now night city editor of newsday, the leading Long Island newspaper.

  "It's gotten so I avoid telling anyone my name," he moans. "Co-workers, chance acquaintances, people I meet in the course of business, all follow the same pattern. 'Asimov? Asimov? Any relative to the Isaac Asimov?'

  "Why, when I was introduced to my wife Ruth, the first words out of her mouth were: 'Asimov?

  Asimov? Any rela-tive to the Isaac Asimov?' "

  If Isaac Asimov has changed in any way in the past twenty years, it is in the gradual diminution of his mad exhibitions and the spontaneous explosions of humor which he employed to reduce his self-consciousness by making himself the center of attraction at any public function. Only the robot stories reflect this aspect of his nature and then satirically. At heart Isaac Asimov is and always has been a very serious man.

  Perhaps the accelerating acceptance by the public of his scientific expositions have convinced him that it is no longer necessary to guffaw and wiggle his ears to attract attention. It has been a long time since that was necessary in science fiction.

  15 CLIFFORD D. SIMAK

  It was Sunday afternoon, September 6th, 1959, in the banquet room of the Hotel Fort Shelby, Detroit, and Robert Bloch was reading the names of the winners of the Hugo awards to the audience as Isaac Asimov announced the categories. The revelation that Clifford D. Simak's novelette, The Big Front Yard, from the October, 1958 issue of astounding science-fiction had been voted the best story of its length during the previous year was lost in the gale of affectionate laughter precipitated by Bloch's expression as he opened the next envelope to find that his own story, That Hell-Bound Train (fantasy and science fiction, September, 1958), had won a Hugo as the best short science-fiction story of the year. But by winning this Hugo, Clifford D. Simak had become the first science-fiction author in history to receive both of the major awards possible in the fantasy world. Earlier, he had taken the 1952 International Fantasy Award for the best novel of science fiction or fantasy published during 1952, City. Had this point been emphasized, no one would have been surprised. Simak's The Big Front Yard was but one of dozens of his superbly wrought tales that endowed ordinary folk with the special qualities to cope with bizarre aberrations of space and time, as well as with technologies that would have baffled an Einstein. In The Big Front Yard, Hiram Taine, repair man and antique dealer, in the company with a handyman misfit who claims to be able to talk with animals, drives a hard bargain with the inhabitants of another world, who have warped his front yard through another dimension so that it faces out upon an alien planet in an unguessable corner of the cosmos. He was typical of scores of other Simak "heroes," who, whether dirt farmer, near-idiot, or love-struck robot, had a function, a reason for being in the universe, who could some-how fathom the unknowable and defeat the omnipotent.

  Five years later, at the age of 60, Clifford D. Simak again received the Hugo at the 22nd World Science Fiction Conven-tion at Oakland, California, September 6, 1964. This time it was for the best novel of the year and he was there to accept it. The novel was Way Station (Doubleday, 1963), originally serialized in galaxy magazine as Here Gather the Stars (June and August, 1963). It is the story of Enoch, who for one hundred years, ever since the Civil War, has tended a way station in the Wisconsin hills for the intelligent races of the galaxy. Agelessly he carries on, with the macabre "good fellows" of the hundred worlds as his nocturnal companions, waiting for the day when circumstances will permit him to reveal his secret to the world—perhaps for its salvation. The Earth is on the verge of a cataclysmic war, but in the simple steadfastness of the rustic Enoch, there still rests hope.

  Simak manages to accentuate the positive in the personali-ties of his diverse group of unlikely

  "supermen." He rarely dwells on the morbid, the horrifying, or the decadent. In his worlds and in the lives of his characters, there is room for hope, for kindness, for decency, and for a morality that would be obvious if the reader were not spellbound by the artistry of the storytelling. Regardless of their origins, his characters are more saints than sinners. Good predominates over evil and optimism over despair. Simak's greatest love and affection is reserved for the farmer. Directly and indirectly, more farmers traipse through the science fiction of Clifford Simak than thro
ugh the works of any author apart from country gentleman's writers. Born on the farm of his grandfather Edward Wiseman on August 3, 1904, in the township of Millville, Grant County, Wisconsin, Simak has never sweated the sweet memory of rural life from his body. His grandfather's farm was on an inland promontory, from which the meeting of the Wisconsin and Mis-sissippi rivers was clearly visible. It was a hill farm, with nearby woods filled with game and streams choked with obliging fish. Almost everything his grandfather's family ate came off that farm. Clifford's father, John L. Simak, was born in Bohemia, in a town near Prague. Son of a butcher (though related to noblemen who had seen better days) he came to work as a hired hand on the Wiseman farm when he emigrated to America where he met and married Margaret Wiseman. A year later he secured some nearby acreage, used lumber from the land to build a log house, and gradually cleared a farm for himself.

  Every fact seems to indicate that Clifford D. Simak was deprived by his family of all the elements needed to weave the tangled web of neuroses which are the birthright of many an author. "If you have read Bob Ruark's The Old Man and the Boy —well, that was my boyhood, too," Simak recalls. "We hunted and fished, we ran coons at night, we had a long string of noble squirrel and coon dogs. I sometimes think that despite the fact my boyhood spanned part of the first and second decades of the twentieth century that I actually lived in what amounted to the tail end of the pioneer days. I swam in the big hole in the creek, I rode toboggans down long hills, I went barefoot in the summer, I got out of bed at four o'clock in the morning during summer vacations to do the morning chores. For four years I rode a horse to high school—the orneriest old gray mare you ever saw, and yet I loved her and she, in her fashion, loved me. Which didn't mean she wouldn't kick me if she had a chance. And before high school. I walked a mile and a half to a country school (one of those schools where the teacher taught everything from first grade through eighth)."

  Young Clifford had to toe the line when there was work to be done, but he was permitted to do all the romping he wanted when there wasn't any chore in the offing. Finances were generally tight, but despite problems the family, which included a younger brother, Carson (now in the insurance business), was closely knit and devoted.

  Two very simple things set his mind toward journalism and writing. He recalls very vividly watching his mother read a newspaper when he was about five.

  "Does the newspaper print all the news from all over the world?" he asked.

  "It does," she replied.

  "Does it print the truth?"

  "It does."

  "From that moment on I knew I wanted to be a newspa-perman," Simak affirms. "And don't you, dammit, snicker."

  A second contributing factor was the old family reading circle so popular years ago. The family would gather around while the mother or father read a book or newspaper. A magic and wonderful world came into view from those read-ings.

  Though he got along well with other boys, Simak did not care for athletics. Academically he did well, standing second in his high school graduating class at Patch Grove, Wisconsin. A series of diverse jobs followed high school, clustered about a two years' teacher training course, which found him an instructor for the next three years. An attempt to work his way through the University of Wisconsin failed and led to his first newspaper job on the iron river reporter, Iron River, Michigan. During this period, several other events occurred which were to shape his entire life. An avid reader of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, he picked up a copy of amazing stories in 1927 and became a regular reader.

  A chance meeting with Agnes Kuchenberg at the motion picture theater in Cassville, Wisconsin, while Simak was teaching there, blossomed into romance and they were mar-ried on April 13, 1929. Only weeks earlier Simak had ac-cepted a staff position on the iron river reporter.

  Like any newspaperman, he wanted to write and because he liked science fiction he decided that was his natural medium. His first effort, The Cubes of Ganymede, was completed and shipped to amazing stories in early 1931. The magazine's editor, T. O'Conor Sloane, then approaching his eightieth year openly confessing that "Old Man River" was his favorite song, didn't believe in rushing things. He never bothered to tell Simak whether he was going to use the story or not, but two years later the April, 1933, issue of science fiction digest listed The Cubes of Ganymede as one of the "Stories Accepted by amazing stories for Publication." Finally, in 1935, Sloane returned the story as "a bit dated" in view of the changing trends in science fiction. Simak never quite recovered from the incident and the manuscript remains unpublished. His next attempt was more successful. World of the Red Sun found acceptance at Hugo Gernsback's wonder stories and appeared in the December, 1931, issue of that magazine. The time-travel story displayed a clear, stark writing tech-nique. The adventurers into the future encounter a gigantic glass-encased brain which holds the degenerating remnants of mankind in slavery. They destroy it by employing the psy-chological weapon of derision. Beyond its obvious debt to H. G. Wells in its basic theme and in the concept of the ultimate degeneration of man as a species, World of the Red Sun was fundamentally a second derivative science-fiction story, whose framework and filling came from stories in the science-fiction magazines. It was the work of a man steeped in the still-fresh lore of the science-fiction world, who assumed that the reader was familiar enough with the medium to accept on faith imaginative notions that were destined to become literary dogma. It was so at the beginning as it would become more so as the years progressed that a Simak story would possess a background that was a distillation of the work in the medium.

  World of the Red Sun was followed quickly by Mutiny on Mercury in wonder stories for March, 1932, a minor action story of the revolt of Martian and Selenite workers on Mercury and their eventual defeat at the hands of an Earth-man wielding a sword dating from the Napoleonic wars. Though badly overwritten and melodramatic, The Voice in the Void, which appeared about the same time in the Spring, 1932, wonder stories quarterly, showed considerable control in handling. The story concerns the desecration of a sacred Martian tomb containing the bones of the Messiah. The fact that the Martian tombs are constructed in the shape of a pyramid provide a clue to the fact that the sacred bones are those of an Earthman. As in World of the Red Sun, Simak's obvious familiarity with hundreds of science-fiction stories enabled him to avoid trite situations and close on a note of originality. Simak experimented by sending his next story, Hellhounds of the Cosmos, to astounding stories. That magazine, then part of the Clayton chain, one of the largest pulp groups in the world, paid 2 cents a word, four times what the other publications could afford, and they paid on acceptance. Pub-lished in the June, 1932, issue of astounding stories, Hell-hounds of the Cosmos told of a "black horror" out of the fourth dimension. To counter it, a scientist sends ninety-nine men into the fourth dimension, where they occupy a single grotesque body. They succeed in terminating the invasion at the price of remaining for the rest of their lives in the alien world. Hellhounds of the Cosmos is worth noting because it is the first story to betray the tendency toward mysticism that frequently sends Simak's science fiction over the ill-defined perimeter of science-fiction fantasy.

  Simak's initial cycle of magazine publication ended with The Asteroid of Gold in the November, 1932, wonder stories. A space pirate who takes the gold found on an asteroid from two explorers and leaves them there to die is doomed to live the rest of his life as an invalid, his back broken by his victims. Here, as in Hellhounds of the Cosmos, Simak draws a sharp line between black and white and brings about sure, grim retribution for the evildoer.

  The temporary suspension of astounding stories early in 1933 left Simak without a paying market for his work. Both wonder stories and amazing stories, the only other maga-zines, were skipping months and it seemed likely that any issue might be their last.

  Simak wrote one more piece of science fiction, literally for the love of it, since as far as he was concerned there was no market. "Had there been a market,
" he asserts, "the story would never have been written, for I would have slanted for that market." In that story, a time machine carries two Earthmen to the laboratory of "a cone of light" that created our universe as an experiment. Three other otherworldly beings, by coincidence, also arrive on the scene. Together they act to prevent "The Creator" from destroying his achieve-ment.

  Shortly upon completing The Creator, Simak received from a science-fiction fan, William H. Crawford, notification of the publication of a "literary" science-fiction magazine which solicited stories and offered a lifetime subscription as pay-ment. Simak let Crawford have the story out of sheer admira-tion for any man with guts enough to try a new science-fiction magazine. The Creator, as published in the March-April, 1935, marvel tales was probably read by only a few hundred readers, yet, by letter, by word of mouth, and through comments in fan magazines, the word got around that Clifford D. Simak had written a "classic," a daring story that defied the taboos of newsstand magazines. While there are certainly crudities in The Creator, many polished modern writers would gladly exchange some of their stylistic sheen for the enthusiasm, excitement, and wonder of mysteries yet to be explored imparted by that early tale. Simak still had the itch to write and tried a few things outside the science-fiction field, but felt they had come off too poorly to submit. Despite the economic pall of the depression years, he managed to keep working. His reporter's job on the iron river reporter grew into the editorship, but he left in August, 1932, to become editor of the spencer reporter in Spencer, Iowa. In July, 1934, he shifted again to the editor-ship of the Dickinson press, Dickinson, North Dakota.

  The purchase of the spencer reporter by the McGiffin Newspaper Company of Kansas, a much larger organization, convinced him that it offered a better future and he returned there in April, 1935, in time to help convert the paper from a semiweekly to a daily. Pleased with his work, the company made him an editorial trouble-shooter, transferring him to Excelsior Springs, Missouri, where he worked on the excel-sior standard, then to the editorship of their Worthington, Minnesota, paper, and finally to the brainerd dispatch in Brainerd, Minnesota.