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.
“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
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