A MIND WORTH KNOWING

"Before Man goes to the Stars, he should learn how to live on the Earth."
 - Clifford D. Simak

"These are the stories the Dogs tell when the fires burn high and the winds blow from the North.

'What was Man?' they will ask.  or   'What was War?'"
 - Clifford D. Simak

  
City, a patch-work novel of  eight short stories written from 1944-1951, 

was a hauntingly beautiful series of tales told by intelligent dogs and robots about the legends of long gone humans. 

You just don’t get more sense of wonder than that.

Clifford D, Simak wrote a different kind of science fiction. 

A kinder, gentler science fiction. 

His characters were adults, ordinary people from the mid-west, 

and his stories often had the feel of small any town America. 

 In 1965, Mr. Simak wrote ALL FLESH IS GRASS ...

which doesn't even have an entry in Wikipedia!!  

As you can see from the cover, it details the story of a small town placed under an invisible dome.

Like King's UNDER THE DOME, 

it tells how being cut off from the world makes people act different, and of course, there’s the mystery of who put the dome over the town and why?

Simak was honored by fans 3 times with Hugo Awards and the Science Fiction Writers of America made him their 3rd Grand Master.

It's hard to believe Stephen King never heard of him.  He heard of John D. MacDonald.  Sigh.

Decades before Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton (1990), MASTODONIA (1978) was published.  

It has the feel of something written in the 1950's, full of wonder and awe. 

It is a charming wonderful tale of time travel. 

Simak's characters are always so engaging and full of life, 

it makes the simplest of them lovable and almost tangible -- even the strange entity that is Catface.

I am currently listening to it on audio book.

 A Novel of Lost Souls ...

Robots refused entry into Catholicism, search out the most remote planet they can find at the rim of the galaxy: End of Nothing.

They labor for 1000 years, building their own vast computerized Pope, dumping into him all the data their "sensitive humans" have found throughout the galaxy with their mental probings.

Enter two human lost souls:

One, Tennyson, a Doctor on the run from a political upheaval on his planet, 

The other, Jill, a reporter looking for the story of her life.

Then, the unthinkable happens, one of the sensitives says she has discovered the literal Heaven!

Murder, betrayal, and intrigue follow.

 Best of all in this cast of charmers are some wonderfully Simak-ian robots: 

a beguilingly crusty electronic Pope and his splendidly idiosyncratic robot Cardinals. 

Mark of Goodreads says of it: 

"Simak's books have such a gentle folksy voice, as if Prairie Home Companion decided to write science fiction."

***

 “It's just a bow and arrow, but it's not a laughing matter. It might have been at one time, 

but history takes the laugh out of many things.

 If the arrow is a joke, so is the atom bomb, 

so is the sweep of disease laden dust that wipes out whole cities, 

so is the screaming rocket that arcs and falls ten thousand miles away and kills a million people.” 

***

WHY DON'T YOU GIVE CLIFFORD D SIMAK A TRY?

These are the stories the Dogs tell, when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north.
Read more at: http://www.azquotes.com/quote/897548