The False Ducks Blahg

  This is a blahg that I’ve been meaning to write for a very long time.  I’ve been a rabid fan of the science fiction author Clifford D. Simak.  In fact, I’ve maintained a website dedicated to “The Science Fiction Short Stories of Clifford D. Simak.”  I was just looking at the website today, May 12th, 2025 and posting some updates.  At the bottom of the main page I have the following:  Created by Scott Henderson on May 13th, 2005  followed by Last modified May 12, 2025.  The previous modified date was August 11, 2023 so I was due to revise it.  The bigger news is that tomorrow, May 13th, my Simak website is celebrating the 20th anniversary of going live.  I guess it was about time I got around to writing that blahg about Clifford D. Simak!

   By the way, that’s a photo of Clifford Simak on the upper right and not me in a cosplay attempt at being Clifford Simak.  I’ll drop the “D.” for now, which stands for Donald.  I remember when I first encountered the writings of Clifford Simak and I remember where I was when I heard he’d died.  I’ll get to that in a bit.  I went back through some of my blahgs and I found that I did reference that elusive Simak blahg during a previous blahg entitled THIS IS 50, PART TWO which I posted in December of 2015.  I had been reviewing some of the first 50 blahgs I had written but the review got a little bogged down so this is what I wrote:  I started my last blahg by reviewing the 50 blahgs I had published up to and including that blahg.  I split it into two blahgs because I felt a review of all 50 would be too long for one posting.  Unfortunately, I’ve skipped over a few blahgs because their topics were very similar.  That left me nine comments short and that’s where the artistic license is going to come into play.  The next nine don’t refer to specific blahgs but are important to me none the less.   One of the nine was number 48 and it talked about Clifford Simak

47.  Clifford D. Simak.  That’s another blahg that needs writing.  He’s my favourite science fiction author and I have a website dedicated to his short science fiction stories:  The Science Fiction Short Stories of Clifford D. Simak.  I started the website in May of 2005 as a way to fill my time.  I wanted it to be one of the most comprehensive websites about this late great author but there is a new website dedicated to the work of Clifford Simak that covers releases in many different countries:  Clifford D. Simak – The International Bibliography.  In many ways it is far superior to my website but I have been encouraged by others to keep my website going.  This past October saw a new release of some of his short stories and it included the release of “I had no head and my eyes were floating way up in the air” which was submitted in the 1970s for publication in Harlan Ellison’s “The Last Dangerous Visions”.  That anthology has never been published but that lost Simak story is available in the new Simak anthology “I Am Crying All Inside and Other Stories: The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak, Volume One”. 

 

   So here we are…back up to speed.    Let’s start with a little introduction of Clifford Simak courtesy of Wikipedia:

Clifford Donald Simak (August 3, 1904 – April 25, 1988) was an American science fiction writer. He won three Hugo Awards and one Nebula Award. The Science Fiction Writers of America made him its third SFWA Grand Master, and the Horror Writers Association made him one of three inaugural winners of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement. He is associated with the pastoral science fiction subgenre.

Pastoral science fiction is slower paced with rural settings or technology as it interacts with people and places never having encountered the technology before.  Probably not as clear as it could be but that’s the gist.  Here’s a list of the novels that Clifford Simak wrote over the years: 

1. Cosmic Engineers (1950)

2. Empire (1951)

3. Time and Again (1951)

4. City (1952)

5. Ring Around the Sun (1953)

6. Time is the Simplest Thing (1961)

7. The Trouble with Tycho (1961)

8. They Walked Like Men (1962)

9. Way Station (1963)

10. All Flesh Is Grass (1965)

11. Why Call Them Back From Heaven? (1967)

12. The Werewolf Principle (1967)

13. The Goblin Reservation (1968)

14. Out of Their Minds (1970)

15. A Choice of Gods (1972)

16. Cemetery World (1973)

17. Our Children’s Children (1974)

18. Enchanted Pilgrimage (1975)

19. Shakespeare’s Planet (1976)

20. A Heritage of Stars (1977)

21. The Fellowship of the Talisman (1978)

22. Mastodonia (1978)

23. The Visitors (1980)

24. Project Pope (1981)

25. Where the Evil Dwells (1982)

26. Special Deliverance (1982)

27. Highway of Eternity (1986)

Notice that Simak published “Highway of Eternity” two years before he passed away.  I was working at a group home in Aurora, Ontario here in Canada in 1988 when a radio personality told about Clifford Simak having passed.  I was surprised by his death but more surprised that someone else thought his passing was noteworthy.  Funny the things you remember.  In high-school I took a course on Futuristic studies and Simak’s novel “City” was part of the course and my first introduction to the author.

   Although Simak didn’t publish his first novel, “Cosmic Engineers” until 1950, and he was around 46 years old, he had been submitting and having his short stories published since 1931.  His first published story was “The World of the Red Sun” appearing in the December 1931 edition of “Wonder Stories.”  That would have put Simak around twenty-seven when he first saw his name in print.  His last short story, “Byte Your Tongue!” was published in the 1981 anthology “Stellar #6: Science-Fiction Stories.”  Fifty years and around 124 short science fiction stories.  That’s impressive! 

   I have collected and own all of Simak’s novels and many years ago I set out to collect and read all of his short science fiction stories.  Here’s an interesting tidbit on a side note:  Between 1944 and 1952 Simak wrote 14 western short stories and between 1942 and 1944 he wrote and published 5 war theme short stories.  I’ve read a few of the western stories but this blahg is going to be dedicated to Simak’s short science fiction stories.  Unfortunately, when I set out to try and find and read all of the short sci-fi stories the Internet was in its infancy and there weren’t a lot of places to find the stories to read online.  So that’s why I set out to compile a list of publications that contained the 124 science fiction short stories by Simak.  That list eventually became my Simak website.

   Creating the website was a daunting task.  First look at the list of short stories I was dealing with and their publication year:

1. “The World of the Red Sun” (1931)
2. “Mutiny on Mercury” (1932)
3. “The Voice in the Void” (1932)
4. “Hellhounds of the Cosmos” (1932)
5. “The Asteroid of Gold” (1932)
6. “The Creator” (1935)
7. “Rule 18” (1938)
8. “Hunger Death” (1938)
9. “Reunion on Ganymede” (1938)
10. “The Loot of Time” (1938)
11. “Cosmic Engineers” (1939)
12. “Madness from Mars” (1939)
13. “Hermit of Mars” (1939)
14. “The Space Beasts” (1940)
15. “Rim of the Deep” (1940)
16. “Clerical Error” (1940)
17. “Sunspot Purge” (1940)
18. “Masquerade” (1941)
19. “Earth for Inspiration” (1941)
20. “Spaceship in a Flask” (1941)
21. “The Street That Wasn’t There” (1941)
22. “Tools” (1942)
23. “Shadow of Life” (1943)
24. “Hunch” (1943)
25. “Infiltration” (1943)
26. “Message from Mars” (1943)
27. “Ogre” (1944)
28. “Lobby” (1944)
29. “City” (1944)
30. “Mr. Meek – Musketeer” (1944)
31. “Huddling Place” (1944)
32. “Mr. Meek Plays Polo” (1944)
33. “Census” (1944)
34. “Desertion” (1944)
35. “Paradise” (1946)
36. “Hobbies” (1946)
37. “Aesop” (1947)
38. “Eternity Lost” (1949)
39. “Limiting Factor” (1949)
40. “Bathe Your Bearings in Blood!” (1950)
41. “The Call from Beyond” (1950)
42. “Seven Came Back” (1950)
43. “The Trouble with Ants” (1951)
44. “Second Childhood” (1951)
45. “Good Night, Mr. James” (1951)
46. “You’ll Never Go Home Again” (1951)
47. “Courtesy” (1951)
48. “The Fence” (1952)
49. “And The Truth Shall Make You Free” (1953)
50. “Retrograde Evolution” (1953)
51. “Junkyard” (1953)
52. “Kindergarten” (1953)
53. “Worrywart” (1953)
54. “Shadow Show” (1953)
55. “Contraption” (1953)
56. “The Questing of Foster Adams” (1953)
57. “Spacebred Generations” (1953)
58. “Immigrant” (1954)
59. “Neighbor” (1954)
60. “Green Thumb” (1954)
61. “Dusty Zebra” (1954)
62. “Idiot’s Crusade” (1954)
63. “How-2” (1954)
64. “Project Mastodon” (1955)
65. “Full Cycle” (1955)
66. “Worlds Without End” (1956)
67. “The Spaceman’s Van Gogh” (1956)
68. “Drop Dead” (1956)
69. “So Bright the Vision” (1956)
70. “Honorable Opponent” (1956)
71. “Galactic Chest” (1956)
72. “Jackpot” (1956)
73. “Operation Stinky” (1957)
74. “Founding Father” (1957)
75. “Lulu” (1957)
76. “Shadow World” (1957)
77. “Death Scene” (1957)
78. “Carbon Copy” (1957)
79. “Nine Lives” (1957)
80. “The World That Couldn’t Be” (1958)
81. “Leg. Forst.” (1958)
82. “The Sitters” (1958)
83. “The Money Tree” (1958)
84. “The Big Front Yard” (1958)
85. “The Civilization Game” (1958)
86. “Installment Plan” (1959)
87. “No Life of Their Own” (1959)
88. “A Death in the House” (1959)
89. “Final Gentleman” (1960)
90. “Crying Jag” (1960)
91. “All the Traps of Earth” (1960)
92. “Gleaners” (1960)
93. “Condition of Employment” (1960)
94. “The Golden Bugs” (1960)
95. “Shotgun Cure” (1961)
96. “Horrible Example” (1961)
97. “The Shipshape Miracle” (1963)
98. “Day of Truce” (1963)
99. “Physician to the Universe” (1963)
100. “A Pipeline to Destiny” (1963)
101. “New Folk’s Home” (1963)
102. “Small Deer” (1965)
103. “Over the River and Through the Woods” (1965)
104. “Buckets of Diamonds” (1969)
105. “I Am Crying All Inside” (1969)
106. “The Thing in the Stone” (1970)
107. “The Autumn Land” (1971)
108. “To Walk a City’s Street” (1972)
109. “The Observer” (1972)
110. “Construction Shack” (1973)
111. “UNIVAC: 2200” (1973)
112. “Epilog” (1973)
113. “The Marathon Photograph” (1974)
114. “The Birch Clump Cylinder” (1974)
115. “The Ghost of a Model T” (1975)
116. “Senior Citizen” (1975)
117. “Unsilent Spring” (1976)
118. “Auk House” (1977)
119. “Brother” (1977)
120. “Party Line” (1978)
121. “Grotto of the Dancing Deer” (1980)
122. “The Whistling Well” (1980)
123. “Byte Your Tongue!” (1981)
124. “I Had No Head and My Eyes Were Floating Way Up in the Air” (2015)

As I said earlier, this was the early days of the Internet and there weren’t a lot of resources and those that existed were incomplete or hadn’t been updated in a long time.  I found a website that listed each short story by Simak (as well as other science fiction authors) and I used it as a basis for my website and continue to build on it and update it annually.  One of the other issues was that some of Simak’s stories were also published under different titles or were republished under different titles.  For example here’s a list of some of the stories followed by their republished titles: 

• AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE (also known as “The Answers”)
• BATHE YOUR BEARINGS IN BLOOD! (also known as “Skirmish”)
• BEACHHEAD (also known as “You’ll Never Go Home Again”)
• GOOD NIGHT, MR. JAMES (also known as “The Duplicate Man” & “The Night of The Puudly”)
• THE LOOT OF TIME (also known as “S.O.S In Time”)
• MASQUERADE (also known as “Operation Mercury”)
• SEVEN CAME BACK (also known as “Mirage”)
• SPACEBRED GENERATIONS (also known as “Target Generation”)
• THE STREET THAT WASN’T THERE (also known as “The Lost Street”)
• THE TROUBLE WITH ANTS (also known as “The Simple Way”)

So the completist in me wanted to make sure I listed all of the sources to find a certain story under its original title and under the republished title. 

   The website took me close to a year to compile and it’s been going strong for the past 20 years.  Here’s a sample of what it looks like for one of the listings: 

• THE TROUBLE WITH ANTS , Fantastic Adventures, January, 1951, USA (Nov 1951 – UK)
  (also known as “The Simple Way”)-–Fantastic July, 1966
  —The Last Man on Earth, ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg & Charles G. Waugh, Fawcett, 1982
  —Science Fiction Gems, Vol. Three, ed. Gregory J. Luce, Armchair Fiction, April 2012
  —Madness From Mars – And Other Short Stories, lulu.com, April 10, 2017
  ––Buckets of Diamonds: And Other Stories: The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak, Volume Thirteen, Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy, June 13, 2023

Of course, I decided to learn HTML coding so I could do some fancy things.  On my website if you hover over the name of the publication, a window will appear showing an image of the cover of that publication. Here’s an example of some of the covers.  The initial appearance of “The Trouble With Ants” was Fantastic Adventures, January 1951.  Here’s the cover to that:

One of the other entries is for “The Last Man on Earth, ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg & Charles G. Waugh, Fawcett, 1982”.  If you hover over that entry on my website, this is the image you would see:

It was a monumental undertaking to try and find the images for all of the entries for each story.  I didn’t find all the related images until 2023 so it’s fairly complete.  The short story “Desertion” has 55 separate listings for publications.  I try and update the listings with new publications because some stories have fallen into public domain and there’s been quick and cheap publications almost every year and the images are mostly stock images or text on a coloured background.  Still, I try and do regular updates but the one I did today was the first one since August of 2023.  Well meaning intentions don’t always work out. 

   A few other things I should note is that I don’t list electronic releases like Kindle.  I’d be forever if I did that because of the public domain releases that keep coming out.  There’s just too many.  I also don’t do foreign issues unless the release is in English.  I have however, made notes if there were audio releases.  The story “Over The River and Through The Woods”, as read by Jonathan Frakes, was issued on audio cassette by Durkin Hayes Publishing in 1995. Cassette also includes Frakes reading “Founding Father” & “Beachhead.”   

It’s been a labour of love updating this website but I’ve enjoyed it and want to keep it going as long as I’m able. 

   I have read all of the short science fiction stories by Clifford Simak and for a while it meant purchasing out of print anthologies and magazines.  Luckily, starting ten years ago in 2015, Open Road Media, began publishing volumes of short stories by Clifford Simak with the goal of publishing all of his science fiction stories as well as his western and war stories.  In July of 2023, Open Road Media finally published volume 14, “Epilog: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak)” and that is as complete as you can get with 123 short science fiction stories and the 14 western and 4 war stories.  In fact, Volume 1, “I HAD NO HEAD AND MY EYES WERE FLOATING WAY UP IN THE AIR” contained the short story by that name that none of us ever thought we’d see.  Simak had submitted it to be included for publication in Harlan Ellison’s “The Last Dangerous Visions” in the 1970s but that anthology never came about and the story “I had no head and my eyes were floating way up in the air”  languished somewhere in Ellison’s vaults.  Now, it’s finally available. 

   Okay, so for those of you who were paying close attention, I said the Open Road Media collections republished 123 short science fiction stories by Clifford Simak.  Earlier, I had said their were 124.  That’s because the Open Road Media collections do not contain the short story “A Pipeline To Destiny” from 1963.  Here’s my entry about that story:

A PIPELINE TO DESTINY****, HKLPLOD # 4, Summer, 1963

The **** after the titled will lead you to the notes section for that page which details the following:

^****“A Pipeline To Destiny” is a newly discovered short story by Simak. It runs approximately 12 pages. Phil Stephensen-Payne, editor of “The Collected Stories of Clifford D. Simak Volume I: Eternity Lost & Other Stories” published by Darkside Press has managed to obtain a copy of this rare story. Phil says: “According to a note from Simak it was written some twenty years earlier but was ‘never finished’. He seems to mean unfinished in terms of ‘final polish’ because the story does come to a conclusion. It’s an odd little item, but certainly of interest to Simak fans and will be reprinted in Volume 5 of the Darkside series.”

Of note is that there was no Volume 5 of the Darkside series so the story has only been published in the fan magazine HKLPLOD # 4, Summer, 1963.  Here’s an image of that magazine: 

Phil Stephensen-Payne sent me a scan of the story a number of years ago and I’ve read it.  It hasn’t been republished but there is a fan website that has a scan available for download at https://fanac.org/fanzines/Hklplod/hklplod_4_mcinerney_1963-su.pdf.  There’s also a version translated into Russian that was published in 2012.  You can read more details about it here:  https://www.simak-bibliography.com/details.php?edition=2613&lang=all&country=all&thumbs=no&order=date&filter=all&ul=en  Maybe someday it will be officially republished in English.  Here is an image of the note that preceded “Pipeline To Destiny” when it was published in Hklplod:

   Apparently, the editor of the fanzine, Mike McInerney, bought the short story at an auction at a Science Fiction Convention. 

   That’s it.  That’s the blahg I meant to write about the short science fiction stories of Clifford Donald Simak.  Check out my website or, if you want to see a more complete version that includes foreign language releases or Kindle versions then you can check out https://www.simak-bibliography.com/.  I’ve really enjoyed collecting and reading Simak’s short fiction.  For a while, I had some rare stories like “Nine Lives” that you could only read if you found a copy of Short Stories-A Man`s Magazine, Dec, 1957 (USA) or Short Stories-A Man`s Magazine, August, 1958 (U.K.).   I still own a copy of the U.S. version:

Here’s what the UK version looked like:

Do yourself a favour and buy all 14 volumes of the Open Road Media series and read all of the short stories.  Then read “City” and work your way through all of the other Simak novels.  You won’t be disappointed.