Clifford D. Simak

Parallel Worlds of

Clifford D. Simak

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Clifford Simak, Nature of Time and Parallel Worlds

Hugh Everett III graduated at the Princeton University in 1957 under the supervision of the famous American physicist John Wheeler. In his doctorate thesis Everett had developed the first formal scientific 'no-collapse' theory that describes parallel worlds. He proposed that infinite time-branching-off into every possible direction is equally real as the time we experience right now. His thesis on the subject is known as the Many-Worlds interpretation of the quantum theory. Although the latter has been overlooked for many years, today it is gaining increasing acceptance and becomes the main challenger of the standard and rapidly retreating Copenhagen interpretation. It ought to be stressed that many years before the appearance of Everett's thesis, Clifford Simak had thoroughly described parallel worlds (esp. alternate Earths) in his science-fiction works using almost identical philosophy in a poetic atmosphere and flavor of rural humility and beautiful autumn weather.

"In the east the moon was rising, a full moon that lighted the landscape so that he could see every little clump of bushes, every grove of trees. And as he stood there, he realized with a sudden start that the moon was full again, that it was always full, it rose with the setting of the sun and set just before the sun came up, and it was always a great pumpkin of a moon, an eternal harvest moon shining on an eternal autumn world.
The realization that this was so all at once seemed shocking. How was it that he had never noticed this before? Certainly he had been here long enough, had watched the moon often enough to have noticed it. He had been here long enough - and how long had that been, a few weeks, a few months, a year? He found he did not know. He tried to figure back and there was no way to figure back. There were no temporal landmarks. Nothing ever happened to mark one day from the next. Time flowed so smoothly and so uneventfully that it might as well stand still."

(Clifford D. Simak: The Autumn Land, (a short story that originally appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1971, Vol. 41, n. 4)

Clifford D. Simak, one of the finest modern science-fiction writers, has dealt with time paradoxes (e.g., in his short story about synchronicities, Worrywart, first publ. in Galaxy Science Fiction, September 1953), immortality (e.g., in his novelette Eternity Lost, first publ. in Astounding Stories of Super-Science, July 1949; or the famous short story Grotto of the Dancing Deer, first in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, April 1980), time travel (e.g., Sunspot Purge, 1940; Small Deer, 1965; Mastodonia, 1978; Over the River and Through the Woods, 1965; The Thing in the Stone, 1970; Highway of Eternity, 1986) and alternate (parallel) worlds (e.g., in the famous novel City (particularly in the story Aesop, orig. in Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1947) , Ring Around the Sun (a novel, 1953), All Flesh is Grass (a novel, 1965), Destiny Doll (a novel, 1971), Auk House (a novella, 1977), Enchanted Pilgrimage and Special Deliverance (both novels, 1975, 1982) ... etc.) very frequently. He has published over 25 novels and possibly about 300 short stories. Interesting and poetic is his typical flavor of pastoral or American 'small-town viewpoint'. Simak was born and raised in Millville (small town in Wisconsin) and became probably the best known proponent of the pastoral science fiction. He spent his adult life as a teacher and journalist in Michigan and Minnesota and often pictured the Midwest and its people. According to Poul Anderson: "when (Simak) dealt with his Midwestern land and people, he was one of the finest regional writers the United States has had. He knew them, he was them, and he gave them to us in his own homely words, which he nevertheless made into poetry." Well-known became Simak's quote from the introduction to Skirmish (1977):

"My reluctance to use alien invasion is due to the feeling that we are not likely to be invaded and taken over. It would seem to me that by the time a race has achieved deep space capability it would have matured to a point where it would have no thought of dominating another intelligent species. Further than this, there should be no economic necessity of its doing so. By the time it was able to go into deep space, it must have arrived at an energy source which would not be based on planetary natural resources."

Clifford Simak began his career with the first published story The World of the Red Sun (it appeared originally in Wonder Stories 1931 and reissued thanks to Isaac Asimov in Before the Golden Age, Doubleday 1974). Simak became really one of the most sophisticated and humane of John Campbell's Golden Age writers (the so-called "Golden Age" of science fiction began in about 1938). In the story mentioned above we can see a funny and entertaining portrayal of very confusing effects of an unfortunate travel forward in time (the point was that the travel backward is impossible).

In the famous Simak's novel City (a linked collection of stories from the 1940s, first published as a novel in 1952, and named the winner of the International Fantasy Award for the best science-fiction novel of the year), the dogs are well aware that in fact there is no past at all. Moreover, they say that

"...we thought all the time that we were passing through time when we really weren't, when we never have. We've just been moving along with time. We said, there's another second gone, there's another minute and another hour and another day, when, as a matter of fact the second or the minute or the hour was never gone. It was the same one all the time. It had just moved along and we had moved with it."

(Simak, City)

The same logic is used in another well-known Simak's novel, Time is the Simplest Thing, in which the past is pictured only as a vanishing ghost: ("There was no grass. There were no trees. There were no men, nor any sign of men...") while the future is empty, too ("It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened - an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark: there was nothing here but emptiness. There had never been anything in this place, nor was anything ever intended to occupy this place..."

(Simak, Time is the Simplest Thing)

"This was the past and it was the dead past; there were only corpses in it - and perhaps not even corpses, but the shadows of those corpses. For the dead trees and the fence posts and the bridges and the buildings on the hill all would classify as shadows. There was no life here; the life was up ahaed. Life must occupy but a single point in time, and as time moved forward, life moved with it. And so was gone, thought Blaine, any dream that Man might have ever held of visiting the past and living in the action and the thought and the viewpoint of men who'd long been dust. For the living past did not exist, nor did the human past except in the records of the past. The present was the only valid point for life - life kept moving on, keeping pace with the present, and once it had passed, all traces of it or its existences were carefully erased.
There were certain basic things, perhaps - the very earth, itself - which existed through every point in time, holding a sort of limited eternity to provide a solid matrix. And the dead - the dead and fabricated - stayed in the past as ghosts. The fence posts and the wire strung on them, the dead trees, the farm buildings, and the bridge were shadows of the present persisting in the past. Persisting, perhaps, reluctantly, because since they had no life they could not move along. They were bound in time and stretched through time and they were long, long shadows.
He was, he realized with a shock, the only living thing existing in this moment on this earth. He and nothing else..."

(Clifford D. Simak: Time is the Simplest Thing)

And the crux for the contemplation of parallel worlds is exactly in the following philosophy:

"One world and then another, running like a chain. One world treading on the heels of another world that plodded just ahead. One world's tomorrow, another world's today. And yesterday is tomorrow, and tomorrow is the past.
Except, there wasn't any past. No past, that was, except the figment of remembrance that flitted like a night-winged thing in the shadow of one's mind. No past that one could reach. No pictures painted on the wall of time. No film that one could run backwards and see what-once-had-been...
One road was open, but another road was closed. Not closed, of course, for it had never been. For there wasn't any past, there never had been any, there wasn't room for one. Where there should have been a past there was another world."

(Simak, City).

And more clearly:

"There isn't any room," said Joshua. "You travel back along the line of time and you don't find the past, but another world, another bracket of consciousness. The earth would be the same, you see, or almost the same. Same trees, same rivers, same hills, but it wouldn't be the world we know. Because it has lived a different life, it has developed differently. The second back of us is not the second back of us at all, but another second, a totally separate sector of time. We live in the same second all the time. We move along within the bracket of that second, that tiny bit of time that has been allotted to our particular world."

(Simak, City)

"'Time sense?'
'Time sense, sir. The other worlds. They are a matter of time, you know.'
'No, I didn't,' Vickers said.
'There is no time,' said Hezekiah. 'Not as the normal human thinks of time, that is. Not a continuous flow of time, but brackets of time, one second following behind the other. Although there are no seconds, no such things as seconds, no such measurement, of course.'
'I know,' said Vickers. And he did know. Now it all came back to him, the explanation of those other worlds, the folIowing worlds, each one encapsulated in a moment of time, in some strange and arbitrary division of time, each time bracket with its own world, how far back, how far ahead, no one could know or guess.
Somewhere inside of him the secret trigger had been tripped and the inherent memory was his, as it always had been his, but hidden in his unawareness, as his hunch ability still was largely trapped in his unawareness.
There was no time, Hezekiah had said. No such thing as time in the terms of normal human thought. Time was bracketed and each of its brackets contained a single phase of a universe so vastly beyond human comprehension that it brought a man up short against the impossibility of envisioning it.
And time itself? Time was a never-ending medium that stretched into the future and the past - except there was no future and no past, but an infinite number of brackets, extending either way, each bracket enclosing its single phase of the Universe.
Back on Man's original Earth, there had been speculation on travelling in time, of going back into yesterday or forward into tomorrow. And now he knew that you could not do it, that the same instant of time remained forever within each bracket, that Man's Earth had ridden the same bubble of the single instant from the time of its genesis and that it would die and come to nothing within that self-same instant.
You could travel in time, of course, but there would be no yesterday and no tomorrow. But if you held a certain time sense you could break from one bracket to another, and when you did you would not find yesterday or tomorrow, but another world."

(Clifford D. Simak: "Ring Around the Sun", from Chapter 38)

"(Latimer said:) 'Prime world is present time? Your old world and mine?'
(Gale said:) 'Yes. If you think, however, of prime world as present time, that's wrong. That's not the way it is. We're not dealing with time, but with alternate worlds. The one you just came from is a world where everything else took place exactly as it did in prime world, with one exception man never evolved. There are no men there and never will be. Here, where we are now, something more drastic occurred. Here the reptiles did not become extinct. The Cretaceous never came to an end, the Cenozoic never got started. The reptiles are still the dominant species and the mammals still are secondary.' "

(Clifford D. Simak: "Auk House", a novella, Ballantine, 1977)

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