Seekers of Tomorrow (36 page)

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.

Though his outside writing activity had ceased, Simak continued intermittent reading on science fiction, without too much enthusiasm, until he learned that John W. Campbell, Jr., had been named editor of the revived astounding stories in late 1937.

"I can write for Campbell," he told his wife, Kay. "He won't be satisfied with the kind of stuff that is being written. He'll want something new." There is the possibility, he now admits, that if Campbell had not been named editor of as-tounding stories, he might never have written science fiction again. His first submission was
Rule 18,
a novelette of the annual football rivalry between Mars and Earth and how Earth goes back in time to assemble a team of all-time all stars to defeat the Martians: an off-beat story, certainly, in its use of scien-tific invention for influencing a sports event instead of the usual business of saving the world from disaster. Campbell, enthusiastic, was sure he had discovered an outstanding new talent. He was a little chagrined to learn that Simak had written for astounding stories almost six years earlier.
Rule 18,
which appeared in the July, 1938, issue, while popular, rated only fourth in the issue in the readers' esti-mate.

Nevertheless, Campbell gave prominent advance notice to Simak's
Hunger Death
in the October issue, a story dealing with the problems of Iowa farmers resettled on Venus, who have had that planet misrepresented to them but are saved from economic disaster when they discover growing on their land a plant which can cure an ancient Martian plague. This story is important, for it finds Simak writing of people he knows. Second only in frequency to the farmer in Simak tales is the heroic newspaper reporter.
Reunion on Ganymede,
Simak's next, was featured on the cover of the November, 1938, number. Dealing with a planned anniversary get-together of veterans of a war be-tween Earth and Mars, the story finds two members of opposing forces thrown into a situation where they reconcile their grievances. It was not an outstanding production, but it led the issue in reader approbation. The themes of the three stories—a football game of the future, Iowa farmers on Venus, and an old war veteran going to a reunion on Ganymede—represented a major move in the direction of naturalness in science fiction. Simak was explor-ing territory that would eventually produce pay dirt.
The Loot of Time,
published in thrilling wonder stories for December, 1938, was more traditional describing the sentimental attachment that springs up between a group of time travelers and a Neanderthal man who inadvertently gets caught up by future science.

In giving readers a new type of story, should an editor dispense with the old? Campbell felt that while change was inevitable, there was still room for what he called the "pow-er" story and what has been termed by others the "super-science" or "thought variant" tale, something along the lines of Edward E. Smith's stories, in which entire universes are in the balance, where space and time are tools in the hands of advanced science.

At Campbell's request, Simak wrote
Cosmic Engineers,
which ran in three parts beginning in the February, 1939, issue of astounding science-fiction.
Cosmic Engineers
employed epic ideas, including a civilization of robots who were guard-ians of the universe, a girl scientist in suspended animation for a thousand years (but improving her mind all the time), another universe in collision with ours, a council of great intel-lects of many worlds and dimensions brought together to cope with the problem and time travel: a novel with enough thrills for five sequels. Nevertheless, Simak considered the effort a failure. He had hoped to blend some of the ground-roots feel of ordinary people into the work but found that "you had to be grandiose in spite of yourself."

Read uncritically,
Cosmic Engineers
is a much more exciting reading experience than the author would lead one to be-lieve. It does not bear close examination, however; there are too many loose ends, but it is reminiscent, in parts, of
The Creator,
even to a godlike manipulator who is senile and insane. This same

"god" is the collective absorption of an entire race into a single mind, bearing some resemblance to Olaf Stapledon's "Cosmic Mind."