Chapter 1

[[deleted user]]

So, I began reading before bed last night. Besides some obviously dated future tech (remote typewriters, eh?) and some semi-magical geodes-wha? space travel, the book is off to a rollicking good start. Two reporters stuck in space, making a news tour of the galaxy, come across a foreign object on the way to Pluto. Nice set-up. Also, I love the description of the mathematician who invented 3d chess. The man went insane PROVING that 2+2 does not always equal 4. :)

[Fred]

Okay so I'll wait on commenting on depth until a little later on since I've read this book before and don't want to let out any spoilers accidentally. (I suppose I should ask who here has already read this.)

However I'd like to mention a few things right off the bat since John touched on it. I have found that most of the sci fi that is my favorite is all what I'd consider "old". I'm thinking these days that that, not coincidentally I believe, means it was written before / slightly after the Apollo 11 mission. That said, there certainly is a lot of just plain awful sci fi written back then! One of the Achilles heels of sci fi of any era is to rely too much on describing the tech. This can easily go off onto other tangents regarding sci fi as a window into the perspective and zeitgeist of a given time period based on the stories that are told of the future, which I hope we will discuss, but for now I'll just stick to the book. While Simak is certainly not immune to this, he does it less than most other authors I've read and is more ambiguous in his descriptions also. Possibly be ause it's one of his early books, there is more of it in Cosmic Engineers, which has the effect of pulling us future dwellers out if the story. I know that I, for one, just can't bring myself to let the internal movie that occurs while reading display an automated typewriter punching out halted, incomplete, all-caps sentences, telegraph style while the crew discusses how warping space-time is an old fashioned means of propulsion. Five thousand years in the future. Are you kidding me, Clifford? So I just make turn it into a message that comes up in something like an email and realize that it's probably an almost equally brutal future anachronism, but one that I can at least stomach a little.

[Fred]

Nota bene: In the future I will try to avoid using my phone to comment as it results in many typos and likely accidental partial posts. Sorry for all of the above mess-ups.

[Lawrence]

Hopefully not too much of a digression here, but I also tend to prefer the science-fiction of that era - not exclusively, I like some much earlier authors, many authors now writing too - but as a generalisation the writing of that era still seems full of surprises, still does the unexpected, even today. I guess everything has its golden age.

Some of those hokey old ideas of how people in 1950 envisioned our era don't bother me so much, and if anything I quite enjoy that sort of detail, probably for the same reason I can still enjoy Invaders from Mars and the like, but then it depends on the writer too.

I wrote a review of Cosmic engineers, which i should still have somewhere. I'll post it once you've read the novel (which by the way I enjoyed) if you're interested.

Are you going to try Empire next (John)?

[[deleted user]]

Fred,

I agree that the imagined future tech of the past brings the contemporary reader out of the story, but it's also part of the charm of reading old sf. There is something special about an imagined future in which mechanical typewriters still exist. Because why not? Reading old speculative fiction shakes us out of our current complacency with current tech, imagining the future to be an extension of what it is now. Yes, that's what Simak was guilty of as well, but reading it now gives us an alternative future to imagine. In another 4000 years, who's to say that our descendants haven't figured out that the solidity of a typewriter is far more tolerable than ESP messages beamed directly to a chip in our heads? And, of course, they've finally come around on the tobacco issue and everyone smokes on spaceships! As an unrepentant tobacco lover, that's the future I'm still looking for. :)

Lawrence, please do post your review here. I am definitely interested.

And, yes, I am going to try Empire next. I'm hoping to keep up a pace of one Simak novel a month until I'm finished reading all of the novels.

Eventually, I'm going to start on the short fiction as well and try to read it chronologically. Some of the early stories seem too expensive for me to obtain. I might settle for just reading what stories have been collected in the past and are relatively easy to find.

[[deleted user]]

As for Cosmic Engineers, I've been busy and haven't read any further than Chapter 2. I'm hoping to read at least a few more chapters tonight.

[Lawrence]

well, here's what I wrote and posted on some forum or other a few years ago (prior to setting up a blog for this sort of thing), for what it may be worth:

Clifford D. Simak Cosmic Engineers (1950)
I've really been going for it with the old science-fiction novels over the last few years, and of all the authors I've read for the first time - which is actually most of them - whilst there have been a good few to prompt the thought I could stand to read other stuff by this geezer, only one has impressed me to the point of my wanting to read everything, this being Clifford D. Simak.

Cosmic Engineers was - on the grounds of 1933's The Creator being considerably shorter - Simak's first novel. In later years, Simak came to regard his own very early work with little enthusiasm, even going so far as to express a hope that his wild west fiction should remain lost; so I approached Cosmic Engineers with curiosity rather than high expectations.

Leaving aside the usual points regarding spacemen who smoke pipes, politely raise hats to ladies, and call out 'Honey, I'm home' upon exiting the airlock, Simak's debut is not unimpressive. Whilst clearly an early novel, and whilst reading like something that aspires in part to the harder science-fiction of Asimov or at least E.E. 'Doc' Smith, the major preoccupations that would flourish in Simak's later stories were already present: the understated appeal to pacifism, the little guy confronted by the cosmic and mysterious, and the weird time travel. It might seem like the aforementioned hint of Asimov would appear entirely out of place amongst the folksy characters of Simak's mythic firmament, and yet there is no incongruity: faster than light travel is attributed to craft that warp the fabric of space, baby universes are created by folding hyperspheres through additional dimensions, and it all gets very Stephen Baxter once you read past everyone talking like James Cagney - and all this from a novel written before the second world war, according to Bud Webster who seems to know about such things.

Simak, if he retains any reputation to speak of, is remembered for meandering tales in pastoral settings, stories which border upon fantasy. Cosmic Engineers serves as a reminder that he cut his literary teeth on science reports for the Minneapolis Star, and that the evolution of his writing was informed by conscious choice rather than a fear of protons. Bud Webster sums it up admirably:

"Good fiction, though, demands a story not just about hardware or weird beasties but how those concepts affect - and are affected by - humans. Just plain folks. That's what Simak excelled at. Don't get me wrong; you can't take the fantastical element out of his stories without losing the humanity, too. Way Station would fall apart without the artificial longevity, aliens, intergalactic teleportation and so on against which Simak cast his characters, no doubt about it, but at the same time without the people there would be little for the hardware to do."

This would account for why something written more than half a century ago should still work so well, regardless of how many times its constituent ideas have been reiterated by more florid writers or with more believable effects; and regarding which, whilst I wouldn't for a second suggest that Doctor Who writers were ever in the habit of plundering Simak for ideas - well, excepting the case of They Walked Like Men - but once you start to notice a pattern...

Here it's the Cosmic Engineers of the title, the nature of their war with a somewhat mysterious enemy, and their great power:

"The idea impacted with stunning force on Gary's brain. They could reshape the universe! Working with the raw materials at hand, with the almost infinite power at their command, they could alter the course of stars, could realign the galaxies, could manufacture planets, set up a well co-ordinated plan to offset entropy, the tendency to run down, the tendency to go amuck."

And it could be argued that the Cosmic Engineers return in Simak's Time and Again as the symbiotic abstracts, all powerful beings existing somewhere beyond our universe as encountered by Asher Sutton, the (cough cough) time traveller with two hearts.

Anyway, eyebrow raising parallels aside, Cosmic Engineers should by all rights collapse under the weight of its own pulp origin, considerable antiquity, and a spaceman called Gary, but it's pretty damn good.

[Lawrence]

There you go, anyway. At the time I'd started to notice quite a few major Simak details that had ended up recycled in the TV show Dr Who (without credit) so it has become a minor bug-bear... in case some of that seems a little too much like I'm talking to myself (even though I am).

Empire, by the way, doesn't seem to have many fans, but personally I still found it very readable.

[[deleted user]]

Thanks, Lawrence. I put off reading your review in case of spoilers, but finally read it this morning, figuring that I was far enough into the book that it wouldn't matter to me too much.

Getting further away from talking about Simak...

I watched the Dr Who reboot as it came out (in 06?), but stopped watching after Series 3 or so. Then, I tried to get back into it with the Matt Smith stuff and never watched more than a few episodes. Recently, I've been trying again. There are a few gems among a bit too much tediousness. I'll keep watching. It rarely works as science fiction, but, at its best ("Dalek", "Father's Day", "The Girl in the Fireplace") it does hit powerful emotional notes even while its time travel premise remains silly and semi-magical. Speaking of magic, the Doctor even has a magic wand with his sonic screwdriver. It's definitely a fantasy show.

I'd be interested to hear what ideas you think they stole from Simak. It's probably likely that the writers plundered old sf ideas. Whether intentional or not is another matter. I know that I'll recognize plot devices and know that I've come across ideas before, but not be able to pinpoint where exactly I had done so.

[Lawrence]

Hello John - to be honest, I've given up on DW some time ago. I just don't have the patience to watch TV these days (except the odd thing like Breaking Bad).

As for Simak material recycled in DW, it turns out that a writer called Robert Holmes was possibly the Simak fan (he was also a newspaper man, interestingly enough). His 1970 story Spearhead from Space first introduced the notion of the Doctor having two hearts and originating from a mysterious and inaccessible region of the galaxy - both of which are true of Simak's Asher Sutton (from 1951's Time and Again) who, it might be worth noting is also a time traveller and has apparently been 'reborn' (just as the Doctor regenerates) - I'd put this down to great minds thinking alike but for Spearhead from Space and it's sequel, Terror of the Autons borrowing so heavily from They Walked Like Men - formless aliens who arrive on earth as a plastic-like substance in meteorite form, who muster themselves together as a corporation with their own factory turning out creatures of living plastic (and some of the specific forms appeared first in Simak, a doll, a chair and so on). Personally I'm not put off by any of this, as I quite like that era of the TV show, but it would be nice if the debt to Simak (or even just parallels) were more widely aknowledged here, if only to get people reading him again.