Good Night, Mr. James and Other Stories
Introduction: The Non-Fiction of Clifford D. Simak
«I sometimes wonder if there is any reality at all—if there is anything but thought. Whether it may not be that some gigantic intelligence has dreamed all these things we see and believe in and accept as real … if the giant intelligence may not have set mighty dream stages and peopled them with actors of his imagination. I wonder at times if all the universes may be nothing more than a shadow show.»
I’m certain no one has ever included Clifford D. Simak in any list of the writers of so-called «hard science fiction»—science fiction arising out of, or based on extrapolations from, the purported «hard sciences» (sciences heavily weighted with technology)—but Cliff was no science lightweight, by any means.
Anyone with even a superficial knowledge of the life of Clifford D. Simak knows that, for most of the fifty-five-year period during which he was a published writer of science fiction, he was also a working journalist—a newspaperman at a time when that career carried a much higher freight of meaning and importance than it does now. And so, of course, he wrote many news stories of various sorts, but those are seldom, if ever, included in the bibliographies of his fiction (even if they can be identified).
But newspapers frequently publish material that is different, in one way or another, from what we think of as «the news,» and for Cliff Simak, this began during his very first newspaper job, when, only a few years after coming to the Iron River Reporter (Michigan), he became the paper’s editor and, among other duties, wrote a regular column entitled «Driftwood.»
It is now impossible to ascertain all of the sorts of things Cliff might have written during his subsequent years working on a variety of newspapers across the Upper Midwest.In those days, most of a reporter’s work went uncredited when the issue was published, making a byline a sought-after reward for good work. But at some point after 1959, during Cliff’s time with the Minneapolis Star and later with the Tribune—with which the Star eventually merged after a period during which they both continued to publish, the Tribune as the morning paper and the Star as the evening paper—Cliff became the go-to guy for the paper’s science-oriented stories, writing stories that ranged from meteorology and climate studies to space exploration (he interviewed Willy Ley), astronomy (he interviewed Harlow Shapley), anthropology, computers, geology, nuclear physics (he interviewed Edward Teller), and energy-oriented issues to hypnosis, unidentified flying objects, and matters concerning how both society and individuals dealt with death. By 1966, Cliff was identified in the paper as the Star’s «science writer» and as the «coordinator for the Science Reading Program» for the Tribune.
Aimed at encouraging an interest in science among young people, the Science Reading Program—perhaps reflecting new national priorities arising following the shock to American complacencies caused by the USSR’s launching of the first artificial satellite—worked with schools to provide students with insights into a variety of the fields of science. It did so well, apparently, that the series was translated for use in schools in India and South America.
Although Cliff was clearly interested in science and the development of technology for most of his life—he used to speak, with a chuckle, of the days of his youth when, on the rare occasions an automobile drove down the roads of his rural area, each resident that saw it would use the telephone to call up the neighbors to let them know it was coming so that they could step outside and see it themselves—most of his education and early career involved no technology or science beyond the typewriter, the printing press, and the telephone. The earliest of Cliff’s surviving journals contains what appears to be a list of out-of-town radio stations that he had listened to, and I wonder if that might reflect enthusiasm following his first ownership of a radio. Those entries are undated, but the first page following them, which lists a series of purchases of firewood, was headed «1932–33.»
And yet, by the early 1960s, he became a writer of books about science—and, specifically, of books that could be called popularizations of a variety of scientific fields for the edification of younger readers. It is unfortunate that any journals he might have kept during those years have not survived to give us an insight into his thinking on such matters, but then, considering that he was still working full time at his newspaper and writing science fiction (this was the period during which he wrote the celebrated Way Station, among other things), as well as writing a series of non-fiction books, perhaps he had no time to bother with a journal.
In 1962, St. Martin’s Press published The Solar System: Our New Front Yard. Its subject was astronomy. From Atoms to Infinity: Readings in Modern Science was published by Harper & Row in 1965. A sort of anthology of essays, edited by Cliff, that had appeared in the Tribune’s Science Reading series in 1963 and 1964, it also included an article by Cliff, entitled «Our Place in the Galaxy,» that was in the section on astronomy, to which the great astronomer Harlow Shapley contributed three articles. Other sections touched on fields such as mathematics (four short articles by Isaac Asimov), meteorology, archaeology, Earth, rocketry (four short articles by Willy Ley), plasma physics, the atom, and cancer. St. Martin’s Press then published Trilobite, Dinosaur, and Man: The Earth’s Story, a book on historical geology, in 1966, followed by Wonder and Glory: The Story of the Universe in 1969. In 1969, Harper & Row published The March of Science, which was an anthology of scientific articles by ten writers on such subjects as relativity, archaeology, virology, and the stars. And finally, in 1971, St. Martin’s Press published Prehistoric Man.
It would be easy to dismiss these books as lightweight; the description «popularization» carries unappealing connotations to most educated readers, and the fact that the volumes are all now over forty-five years old strongly implies that they are certainly outdated—and, in some senses, that is true.
Moreover, these books were clearly aimed at young readers.
Nonetheless, value can be found in at least some of these books. I decided to read Wonder and Glory, for instance, simply because of the title. Having read every piece of Cliff’s fiction that I could reach multiple times, I noticed that he used the phrase «wonder and glory» on a number of occasions, generally in some context relating to outer space, and I came to the conclusion that the phrase had some particular, perhaps strongly psychological, meaning to him.
Now over forty-seven years old, Wonder and Glory lacks the tremendous knowledge and insights that have been given the field of astronomy in those superseding years, of course, and yet the book has more value than I expected, providing a smooth, easily understood primer on the basics of that field—much of which I had once known, but had forgotten. Clearly, Cliff had a touch for explaining things; and the only things missing from the book are the things that would later be built on the matters he explained.
(The contemporary reviews of the book seem to have focused on the fact that it did not bother with footnotes and citations, a short-sighted criticism given that the idea was not to drive away young readers.) Similarly, I decided to read Prehistoric Man largely because I had noticed that Cliff made a number of references in his fiction to, well, the images we have of prehistoric mankind (see such stories as «The Loot of Time» and «Final Gentleman,» for example). And I was charmed by the book, short though it is. Using the device of portraying the life of two prehistoric societies through the eyes of two old men—one, a member of a hunter society, at the beginning of the book, the other, a member of an early farming community, at the end—it challenges the reader to treat early men as already human rather than as vicious or animalistic. And in the midst of presenting the basic facts known by the experts (in 1970, I suppose) regarding our prehistoric ancestors (again, in smooth, easily flowing prose that eschews footnotes and citations), Cliff did not hesitate to provide some interesting opinions, such as: