The Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak

Clifford D. Simak wrote science fiction with a quiet, rural warmth that set him apart from the ray-gun spectacle of his contemporaries. This volume gathers his shorter tales, the pulp-era stories in which robots keep faith with the humans who built them, aliens turn out to be neighbors rather than invaders, and Midwestern farm country meets the far edges of space. Simak returned again and again to decency, loneliness, and the slow pull between progress and the land, and even his strangest premises stay grounded in ordinary kindness. Readers who know him only from ‘City’ or ‘Way Station’ will find the same gentle imagination working at shorter length. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.