Alien encounters, rural life, time travel, and cooperation.
Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) was an American science fiction writer and newspaper journalist. Born in rural Wisconsin, he spent much of his working life at the Minneapolis Star. He began publishing science fiction in 1931 and continued writing alongside his newspaper work. His books include City, a collection of linked stories about humanity's future, and Way Station, which won the 1964 Hugo Award for best novel.
His stories often place aliens and unfamiliar technology in rural settings. “The World That Couldn't Be” follows a farmer hunting an alien animal he does not understand. In “Project Mastodon,” time travelers try to establish a country in the distant past. Simak frequently writes about cooperation between different forms of life and the problems caused by human ignorance or fear. His characters face practical difficulties with work, money, and survival alongside the scientific questions.
From a quick encounter to a longer story.
A stranded fugitive boards a living spaceship and begins planning how to make its extraordinary power his own.
Three friends invent time travel, claim prehistoric America as a nation, and discover that founding a country is harder than reaching the past.
A planter hunts the alien beast eating his crop, only to find that each mile of the chase makes his quarry smarter and more dangerous.
As invulnerable creatures overrun Earth, a scientist sends ninety-nine volunteers into the fourth dimension to strike at their source.
A pilot risks a solo flight to Mars, where a hidden survivor and a silent alien intelligence reveal why Earth’s missions never came home.
A timid traveler is mistaken for a space-polo expert, then forced into a deadly match with his ship and reputation at stake.
A mild bookkeeper’s quiet tour of the Solar System turns him into an asteroid-town marshal with an alien beast for backup.
After nearly six thousand years of immortality, a man who wants to die attempts a radical cure: rebuilding the world of his childhood.
A hunted mutant slips past Pluto’s quarantine and finds a dead scientist, a false disaster, and a doorway to a world remembered only in nightmares.
When a reclusive professor’s familiar street begins to lose blocks and buildings, an old theory about reality becomes his only explanation.
