I’ve finally completed my article for Journey Planet on depictions of organized labor in the 40s and 50s science fiction of Clifford D. Simak. I plan on adding to it over the next few months as I read more. After it appears for Journey, I’ll post it on my site in whatever version is current. The project lead me to read a vast range of Simak short fictions, a small slice of which I’ve reviewed on my site, including the first two stories revised for his iconic masterpiece City (1952). I’ll cover “Huddling Place” (1944) soon as well.

Enjoy!

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4.25/5 (Very Good)

“City” first appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, ed. John Campbell, Jr. (May 1944). You can read it online here.

This is a good one! I read the 1952 novelized version of the City stories in my late teens. At the time, logically, I was fascinated by the sentient dogs and the slow apocalypse of humanity that unfolds across the generations. For whatever reason, the earliest stories without dogs, for example “City” (1944) and “Huddling Place” (1944), faded from the culminative aura the novel generated all these years later. This project compelled me to break my deep-seated compulsion to read what I haven’t read before.

“City” (1944) provides the near future foundation for the following stories. Cheap transportation technology gives humanity the opportunity to flee the cities for acred estates in the countryside.¹ In the revised version that appeared in the 1952 fix-up, Simak integrates an additional explanation for humanity’s dispersion to the countryside: the threat of nuclear war.² Simak elevates nuclear terror as the main cause of urban depopulation in the underrated “Full Cycle” (1955), a conceptual rewrite of “City” (1944). In both instances, the cities lay in ruin occupied by an assortment of individuals unable to divorce their existence from the earlier centrality of urban life. In “City,” other denizens of the once-bustling streets include farmers, dispossessed of their land, unable to make a living or pay taxes. Hydroponics companies put mom-and-pop farmers out of business (141). As I argue in my article for Journey Planet, Simak’s fiction harkens back to the central tenets of third-party anti-capitalist pro-farmer and pro-union radicalism in his state of Minnesota.

John Webster works for the city government despite knowing the “the city as a human institution is dead” (147). Deeply bothered by the plight of the homeless farmers, John attempts to combat the mayor’s plan to burn down the city’s abandoned buildings. Soon out of a job, John approaches the Bureau of Human Adjustment for employment. Simak uses this lull in the story to spell out his critical views on technology harnessed without an understanding of potential effects: “years ago, with the advent of atomics, in fact, the world committee faced a hard decision. Should changes that spelled progress in the world be brought about gradually to allow the people to adjust themselves naturally, or should they be developed as quickly as possible” (149). Of course, the committee decided that progress trumped all. Soon a showdown between the homeless farmers and the remaining urban city dwellers looms.

While not as ruminative or deeply mournful as some of the later stories in the series, “City” succeeds due to its critical stance on the city as a symbol of humanity’s progress, empathetic take on the downtrodden, and Simak’s readable prose.

Highly recommended.

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3/5 (Average)

“Ogre” first appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, ed. John Campbell, Jr. (January 1944). You can read it online here.

Don McKenzie, a corporate prospector for Galactic Trading Company, walks around an alien planet with a sentient moss draped around his shoulders named Nicodemus. It’s a planet in which plants became intelligent. Their roots send messages. And alien moss enter a symbiotic relationship with whatever entity its attached to. Nicodemus was “accepted as intelligent life” only when they were “wrapped around their humans” as “their intelligence and emotions were borrowed from the things that wore them” (124). Every human wants a moss. They counterbalance the effects of living on an alien world, treat alien diseases, provide warmth, and create energy from their surroundings for their human hosts. What does the moss get in return? Sentience and deliverance from its previous “pseudo-life’ (124).

The plot follows the Galactic Trading Company’s attempt to collect symphonies from sentient trees. Earth audiences devour the otherworldly music. Prospectors like McKenzie imbibe serums to resist the music. Complicating matters, Earth’s greatest composer appears to have fled to the musical trees after hearing one of their songs–and he’s not equipped with a sentient moss or a dose of serum. There are also trees that shoot at humans. Spunky corporate robots. And a telepathic vegetal entity called the Encyclopedia that “wants to go to Earth and study our Civilization” (127). A vista of corporate greed threatens the delicate entendre between various factions–and the sentient trees and their allies attempt a grandiose plot to defeat earth’s rapacity.

For sheer inventiveness, “Ogre” (1944) can’t be matched. Unfortunately, the story unfolds at breakneck speed in a vast variety of different directions in an unsatisfying manner. The parts and ideas are all here. I wish Simak had spent a bit more time on some of the threads!

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2.75/5 (Below Average)

“Spaceship in a Flask” first appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, ed. John Campbell, Jr. (July 1941). You can read it online here.

A newsman, Sherm Marshall of the Solar Press, finds Old Eli at one of the “many disreputable dives situated against the walls of the domed city of New Chicago on the Twilight Belt of Mercury” (45). Old Eli murmurs about strange salts and a doctor long since dead, ensconced in his sanitarium on the far side of Mercury, supposedly still alive. Marshall soon discovers that there is truth to Old Eli’s drunken mumblings. And the old man’s mysterious death suggests someone else knows the secret. Marshall sets off to investigate. Within the famous facility, founded to find a cure for the “space disease, which regularly struck down the men who roamed the trails between the planets” (48), secret threatens to transform the universe. Unfortunately, in his absence, Marshall’s been framed for the murder of Old Eli. And if he’s able to clear his name, what will happen if big business gets its hand on the secret?

While certainly an apprentice story, “Spaceship in a Flask” contains the incubatory manifestations of many of Simak’s central themes: a deep suspicion of transformative technologies in the hand of big business, rural hillbillies with deeper insight than city folk care to admit, and a bleak view of the space travel. Marshall must grapple with the morality of corporate control over the secret of immortality. Considering Simak’s depiction of capitalistic vastation caused by new energy technologies in “Masquerade” (1941) and “Tools” (1942), it’s not surprising the ultimate decision Marshall takes. Simak will return to this topic with far more precision in his wonderful novel Why Call Them Back from Heaven? (1967). And his subversive takes on space travel resonate, check of the far superior “Conditions of Employment” (1960).

I did not expect to enjoy my exploration of Simak’s pre-WWII stories as much as I have!

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Notes

1. John W. Campbell, Jr. wrote about the effects of cheap transportation a fear years in his “Megapolis” editorial for the February 1948 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. ↩︎
2. Here’s the added explanation from City (1952) from a discussion between Gramp and Adams, the grandson of his old army buddy: “‘He was messed up with atomic power,” said Gramp. “That’s right, said Adams proudly. “Got into it just as soon as it was released to industry. Right after the Moscow agreement.” “Right after they decided,” said Gramp, “they couldn’t fight a war.” “That’s right,” said Adams. “It’s pretty hard to fight a war,” said Gramps, “when there’s nothing you can aim at.” “You mean the cities.” said Adams. “Sure,” said Gramp, “and there’s a funny thing about it. Wave all the atom bombs you wanted to and you couldn’t’ scare them off. But give them cheap land and family planes and they scattered just like so many dadburned rabbits.'”
   
   He includes a second reference of atomic war in an added nearly page-long section to John Webster’s speeches to the City Council. I have reproduced the relevant part: “For if this city had not outlived its usefulness, as did every other city–if the cities of the world had not been deserted, they would have been destroyed. There would have been a war, gentleman, an atomic war. Have you forgotten the 1950s and the 60s? Have you forgotten waking up at night and listening for the bomb to come, knowing that you would not hear it when it came, knowing that you would never hear them, if it did come? But the cities were deserted and industry was dispersed and there were no targets and there was no war.” ↩︎

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