Book Review: Worlds Without End, Clifford D. Simak (1964)

/ Joachim Boaz
  • Richard Powers’ cover for the 1st edition

3.25/5 (collated rating: Above Average)

I’m a compulsive list maker. In the past few years I’ve gathered and submitted older science fiction short stories that depict worker unions–from Robert Silverberg’s “Guardian Devil” (1959) to Mari Wolf’s “Robots of the World! Arise!” (1952)–to the Hugo Book Club’s fantastic index. It’s about time I finally get around to reviewing a few of my submissions!1

Clifford D. Simak’s collection Worlds Without End (1964) contains two novellas and one short story that appeared in Robert W. Lowndes’ magazines (second/third tier SF markets in the 50s). Two of three–“Worlds Without End” (1956) and “Full Cycle” (1955)–speculate on evolution of the trade union after the breakdown of the state.

  • Left two covers by Ed Emshwiller; Far right cover Frank Kelly Freas

“Worlds Without End” (1956), 3/5 (Average): First appeared in Future Science Fiction, ed. Robert W. Lowndes (Winter 1956-1957). You can read it online here.

This story takes place in a future in which allegiance to one’s labor union has replaced patriotism. Unions are run as dictatorships–“there must be no wavering in the loyalty of any members” (20)–and create unfixable factionalism within society as “unions were the only loyalty in which a man could cling” (35). The Dream Guild, once a branch of Education, control the use of Myrt, the “great machine of dreams.” Like a 50s version of art-creating AI, Myrt weaves from sophisticated punch cards with symbols and equations, “the strange stories of many different lives” (29). Those that seek escape ask the Dream Guild to create an illusion in which to dwell for hundreds of years.

Norman Blaine, Director of Fabrication within Dream, is a man on edge. Shakeup rumors swirl within the guild involving his own promotion. A strange woman named Lucina Silone appears wanting a Dream but he can’t seem to pin down the truth behind why she wants to give her body and mind over to the guild’s fabricated hallucination. And then there’s the incident with Lew Giesey, the business agent of the Dream Guild, who had ruled with “an iron fist and disarming smile” (17). Summoned, Blaine walks into his office to discover Giesey dead in his chair and Blaine’s own promotion letter on floor. There’s a conspiracy afoot!

I found “Worlds Without End” an effective thriller containing an expected 50s critique of the unions–i.e. organizations designed to advocate for workers become mini-dictatorships shorn of their original purpose. There are strikingly few positive examples (no pun intended). That said, the world takes the form of a dystopic extrapolation and tentatively suggests a new future of inter-union exchange. While I won’t spoil the nature of the conspiracy, it channels growing post-WWII paranoia of government secrecy–i.e. Eisenhower’s “Military–industrial complex.” Simak seems to suggest while secretive programs might have value they must also operate with transparency.

If you’re in the mood for a functional 50s paranoid thriller, you might enjoy elements of this one. It’s not top-notch Simak.

“The Spaceman’s Van Gogh” (1956), 3.25/5 (Above Average): First appeared in Science Fiction Stories, ed. Robert W. Lowndes (March 1956). You can read it online here.

Anson Lanthrop arrives on an unremarkable and seldom-visited planet, with gnome-like aliens who live in “prairie dog town villages,” searching for information on the last years of Reuban Clay’s life (77). Clay, known as “The Spaceman’s Van Gogh,” spent his life avoiding “glory or acclaim” travelling from planet to planet, looking, searching, hunted by something (78). He could have amassed a fortune or put on art exhibits but sold his canvases solely to further his travels. Spurred on by his own need for purpose, Lanthrop attempts to reconstruct the last movements of Clay’s life. And on this planet of benign and caring aliens, Lanthop finds a Clay painting in a mud burrow and hints of the artist’s antiquarian beliefs that propelled him forth.

I am always fascinated by Simak’s love of plots in which scholarly characters who attempt to chart and collect data on different topics–the historian Dr. Ambrose Wilson in “Full Cycle” (1955) is another example–and simultaneously learn about themselves or overcome their own traumas. While not a top-tier Simak story, I found “The Spaceman’s Van Gogh” an intriguing rumination, if a bit forced, on the role of religion in a technologically advanced future.

Somewhat recommended.

“Full Cycle” (1955), 3.5/5 (Good): First appeared in Science Fiction Stories, ed. Robert W. Lowndes (November 1955). You can read it online here.

Like so many of Simak’s stories, “Full Cycle” traces the collapse of the City as a physical place and a central concept of civilization. Dr. Ambrose Wilson, a history professor, receives communication that his “university will cease to function at the end of the present term” (94). Within his ivory tower, he had lived in an “unreal and unsubstantial world” in which he adhered to the old way of life despite the rapidly changing American landscape (95). The city, once the center of American culture and industry, no longer exists. Instead, a “nomad population” roams in trailers from place to place with a new culture and new values (95). A few stuffies, used to relying on the labor of others, live in their once luxurious homes (97). The ties that bind man to an urban and suburban lifestyle no longer exist. Despite his advanced age, Ambrose decides to set off with his neighbor (and his family) in a brand new trailer to collect data on the cause of the transformation and find a place in the new world.

Ambrose speculates that the deep fear of nuclear war created a “cleavage of the culture” as “man “had lain in bed, tensed and listening for the coming of the bomb, knowing even as he listened that he’d not hear it if it came” (99). This existential dread of annihilation meant that the federal government’s order to decentralize industry, so there’s “no target big enough for anyone to waste a bomb on” (107), is not met with protest. Large swarms of workers move across the countryside from factory to factory. Federal and national union authority disappears. Ambrose observes how trade unionism evolves: the nomadic communities create their own war chest and provide their workers assistance. Each trailer camp became “an independent, self-sufficient unit” (105). Unlike the stuffies he encounters, Ambrose sees the logic in the change: unions become “the one remaining solid thing that was left to them. Naturally, they embraced it; it took the place of government” (106). As Ambrose moves from community to community (they say they don’t need historians), he notices the appearance of strange new professions: green-thumbers, rainmakers, agronomists…

The 1950s saw the publication of multiple anti-suburbia articles, monographs, sociological studies, and science fiction satires.2 Television served as a “powerful normalizing” force in the promotion typical American lives, aesthetics, fashion, and spaces.3 Carl Abbott in Imagining Urban Futures: Cities in Science Fiction and What We Might Learn from Them (2016) briefly discusses Simak, who had fond memories of his rural Wisconsin upbringing vs. his later career as an editor in the Twin Cities, as an example of the antiurbanism common at the time.4 Abbott argues that for Simak, cities and suburbs “were an unfortunate transition between the rural nineteenth century and what he hoped might be a broad-acre society for the twenty-first century.”5 Simak’s “Full Cycle” (1955)–which isn’t mentioned in Abbott’s analysis–suggests that suburban life, and its reliance on technology, prevents the true development of the human mind.

A solid ideas story with an appealing main character (at least for me) and a somewhat positive take on the vital role that local branches of workers unions might take in a decentralized future. I perpetually find that Simak’s fascination with ruralism and the need to return to it is undercut by forms of advanced technology–for example robots in A Choice of Gods (1971)–or various assorted magiks that allow one to maintain the ease of modern life.

Notes

  1. My contributions to the list in chronological order (some weren’t added): Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore’s “A Gnome There Was” (1941), Jack Williamson’s “Breakdown” (1942), Leo Zagat’s “Slaves of the Lamp” (1946), H. Beam Piper’s “The Mercenaries” (1950), H. Beam Piper’s “Day of the Moron” (1951), Mari Wolf’s “Robots of the World! Arise!” (1952), H. Beam Piper’s “The Null-ABC” (1953), Poul Anderson’s “The Troublemakers” (1953), James Blish’s “One-Shot” (1955), Clifford D. Simak’s “Full Cycle” (1955) and “Worlds Without End” (1956), H. Beam Piper’s “The Edge of the Knife” (1957), Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s “The Lineman” (1957), Robert Silverberg’s “Guardian Devil” (1959), David R. Bunch’s “Holdholtzer’s Box” (1971), Frederik Pohl’s “Merchant of Venus” (1972), Rachel Cosgrove Payes’ “Deaf Listener” (1973), William Rotsler’s “The Raven and the Hawk” (1974), F. Paul Wilson’s SimGen Sequence (2000-2003) ↩︎
  2. See Anna G. Creadick’s chapter “Picture Windows and Peyton Place: Exposing Normality in Postwar Communities” in her spectacular monograph Perfectly Average: The Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America (2010), 118-141. ↩︎
  3. Creadick, 125; See also Dianne Harris’ Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America (2013). ↩︎
  4. Abbott, 121. ↩︎
  5. Abbott, 121. ↩︎

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16 thoughts on “Book Review: Worlds Without End, Clifford D. Simak (1964)”

  1. It’s telling to watch the curve, starting out with almost all negative depictions (even by Left-Wing writers). Then, starting in the 1990s, the pendulum swings in the other direction, with nearly all positive depictions (even by Libertarian writers who lean towards the Right-Wing of the political spectrum).

    Interestingly, “Full Cycle” reminds me of the Rolltown novels by Mack Reynolds (from the 1970s). I have not read “Full Cycle” as of yet, so I can’t say how far the similarities hold. I still find it odd that two writers I consider very different in Simak and Reynolds would write fiction I found reminiscent of the other. I wonder if Reynolds found any inspiration from this short story.

    Speaking of union representation in genre fiction, it would seem that Reynolds would be another likely source. I didn’t see anything from him on the list. I am drawing a blank at the moment, but I must be missing some obvious examples.

    Reply

    • I have read, and reviewed, Rolltown. Did not care for it at the time. I imagine I would be more open to the lengthy political philosophy passages that characterize his fiction than I was then. It was on my mind recently as the Abbott book that I mentioned has a section on migrating cities, and both the Simak and the Reynolds would have been perfect inclusions but were left out. I’ve never got into Reynolds fiction other than a handful here and there. I’ve had his short story “Mercenary” (1962) on my media landscapes of the future series for a while.

      Feel free to leave suggestions—like the Reynolds if you identify which works of his– on the list for the Olav at the Hugo Book Club. He is very open to suggestions.

      Reply

  2. I read – via one of the Aldiss’ Penguin anthologies – Simak’s short story ‘Skirmish’. I enjoyed it and when I saw a copy of ‘Why Call Them Back from Heaven’ recently I snapped it up. Haven’t got round to it yet but will in due course.

    I had no awareness at all of Simak before the Aldiss anthology so am pleased to have made his aquaintance.

    Off topic but I’ve discovered that Donald Westlake wrote at least one SF short story in the immediateish post-war period. Sadly I doubt it features his most famous character, Parker, but I gather it’s about murder and insurance fraud in the asteroid belt.

    Reply

  3. I’m glad Carl Abbott’s ‘Imagining Urban Futures’ seems to have been of some use.

    ‘Full Cycle’ sounds to be a fleshed out version of Simak’s criticism of the city in favour of a new, technologically equipped pastoralism—as can be found in the ‘City’ sequence.
    So thanks for directing me to this story of Simak’s.

    Recently I’ve been interested in looking at Simak’s ‘City’ stories again through the lens of the French Marxist social critic, Henri Lefebvre. Not only did Lefebvre attribute to Simak a significant role in his own development in the 1950s (briefly outlined in a recent essay by me), but his “mature” critique of the city can be contrasted with Simak’s. Whereas Simak seemed to share the growing disdain for the city that was emerging in the mid-twentieth century from a variety of sources, Lefebvre argued that such critics confused the city in its various historical iterations with the more recent industrial city of the 19th and 20th centuries, and its attendant suburbanisation.

    Lefebvre was impressed with Simak’s criticism of suburbia, but ultimately he sees it as a form of idealistic escapism that does not reckon with the promise of urban forms for encounter and play. Rather than escape the city, Lefebvre argues that we must reconfigure it, preferably beyond its capitalist and industrial impasse. Or at least that’s my extension of Lefebvre pace Simak, because even though Lefebvre references Simak in passing he never truly reckons with his fictional “arguments”.

    Reply

    • I thought you might be intrigued by the Simak! I feel for Simak’s nostalgia for his rural childhood. I grew up in rural Virginia and have incredibly fond memories of wandering miles and miles from my home through the rural Appalachian woods… I imagine returning to a life in rural America yet simultaneously know how isolated I would feel from communities I value. I, too, find Simak trying to imagine a rural existence that maintains the ease of urban life — hence his narrative tendency to resort to what I snarkily called “magiks” in “Full Cycle” — as in, ESP, etc. He pulls the same in A Choice of Gods (1971) (ESP and robots).

      Reply

  4. Simak is an interesting one, he’s not a great stylist but his oddball perspective consistently pushes his material into unpredictable corners of sf. Have only read “City”, “Why Call Them Back from Heaven” and one volume of his collected short fiction but have enjoyed all of them. Hadnt teally considered him in the context of the subject of organized labor, his politics overall seem kind of inscrutable, or at least dont fit into any clear category modern readers would recognize.

    Reply

    • Yeah, Simak does not appear on the 1968 list of authors who opposed or agreed with the US in Vietnam so he doesn’t fit neatly with the politics of some of the older guard of SF authors who got started, like he did, in the 1930s and 40s.

      As Anthony noted below, I enjoy Simak’s style — while he might not have a prose-style littered with moments of beauty, his fiction evokes a sense of fireside chat which is powerful and homey in its simplicity. This does not mesh as well when he’s not in a more pastoral world — in this collection it works far better in “Full Cycle” than “Worlds Without End.” His stories are always readable despite the tendency to insert fascinating idea-exploring ruminations and lectures. I enjoy his work. He has major missteps of course — “The Birch Clump Cylinder” (1974) is an awful short story.

      Reply

  5. I think Simak expresses in science fictional terms the profound sense of dislocation and openness that modern, industrial urban capitalist societies became known for in the late 19th into the 20th century. For instance, the paradoxically named novel, ‘City’, is the fable of the end of this urban civilisation, though not so much by revolution but by boredom. This is similar to what Henri Lefebvre and the situationists would also say later in the 1950s and 1960s (among others).

    I feel that ‘City’ is science fiction at its best. Not just telling the story of its present in science fictional garb, but also wrestling with what was its present’s coming to be was/is—and, in particular, what the rapid technological transformations and acceleration of the last two centuries have made possible. This is, in part, SF’s specificity: it is a literature solely of the industrial and (so-called) post-industrial human.

    SF is the literary expression of the future as a goal and destination for the present—even, and especially, as it draws upon its past, SF and non-.

    Certainly Simak is no stylist like his avant-garde contemporaries in Europe or the US, for example, but he has a style nonetheless. Its avuncular, which is fine by me. Simak telling a story by the fireside under star light while we all sit entranced.

    I love the French title for ‘City’: ‘Demain les chiens’ (Tomorrow the dogs), which is almost certainly a more accurate title, even if it has none of the strange perplexity of the original English title. Even so, the first story in the French collection has the same name as the English, which means they could have used it nonetheless: La cité. Though the French are more likely to call an actual city la ville rather than la cité.

    Henri Lefebvre knew the book as Tomorrow the dogs. That this fine gem of 1940s and 50s US SF ended up influencing both Lefebvre and the situationists in the 1950s and 60s is profoundly interesting to me. Lefebvre, in particular, took up Simak’s criticism of the city and argued that it was really an argument against the industrial city, not cities as such. Particularly given the possibilities for the end of alienated wage labour by way of automation. Lefebvre’s imagined ‘concrete utopia’ thus owed not only the situationists a debt of gratitude but also Simak.

    Reply

    • All of your analysis of Simak’s City suggests I really need to return to it….

      I like your description of his prose and vibe. It does have the fireside chat sort of feel. Echoing what you said about Lefebvre, I’d suggest that “Full Cycle” does pin the blame on the industrial city directly — not the city itself. The new swarms are collections of self-sufficient mini-cities in some ways vs. small town communities linked directly to a place. Simak also dodges some of the classic City as Babylon type critiques.

      Let me know when you get to “Full Cycle”!

      Reply

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