Tales of nostalgia and loss in a world overrun by technology Hank is
walking home from the bar when the Model T pulls alongside him. It's
been decades since he saw a car this old, and the sound of it takes him
right back to his twenties. The door is open, and when he climbs in, the
car takes off-without a driver. Before he knows what's happened, Hank is
right back at Big Spring Pavilion, where he spent his youth drinking
bootleg whiskey and chasing pretty girls. He will find the past is not
quite as he remembered it, but still a lovely place to go for a drive.
This collection includes some of the finest short fiction Clifford Simak
ever wrote, including "City," the story that became the basis for his
beloved novel of the same name. In the history of science fiction, no
author has ever better understood that the Great Plains and the cosmos
are closer together than we think. Each story includes an introduction
by David W. Wixon, literary executor of the Clifford D. Simak estate and
editor of this ebook. "To read science fiction is to read Simak. A
reader who does not like Simak stories does not like science fiction at
all." -Robert A. Heinlein "Like Olaf Stapledon and SF's later mystics,
Simak could dream on a grand scale. . . . Thoreau or Wordsworth would
feel at home in his isolated houses rooted in natural landscapes."
-Locus "Simak is the most underrated great science fiction writer alive,
and has never written a bad book." -Theodore Sturgeon "I read
[Simak's] stories with particular attention, and I couldn't help but
notice the simplicity and directness of the writing-the utter clarity of
it. I made up my mind to imitate it, and I labored over the years to
make my writing simpler, clearer, more uncluttered, to present my scenes
on a bare stage." -Isaac Asimov "Without Simak, science fiction would
have been without its most humane element, its most humane spokesman for
the wisdom of the ordinary person and the value of life lived close to
the land." -James Gunn During his fifty-five-year career, Clifford D.
Simak produced some of the most iconic science fiction stories ever
written. Born in 1904 on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin, Simak got a
job at a small-town newspaper in 1929 and eventually became news editor
of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, writing fiction in his spare time.
Simak was best known for the book City, a reaction to the horrors of
World War II, and for his novel Way Station. In 1953 City was awarded
the International Fantasy Award, and in following years, Simak won three
Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award. In 1977 he became the third Grand Master
of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and before his
death in 1988, he was named one of three inaugural winners of the Horror
Writers Association's Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.
