Parallel Worlds of 

Clifford D. Simak








 
*3.8.1904
+25.4.1988

Various excerpts from Simak's books

"Space is an illusion, and time as well. There is no such factor as either time or space. We have been blinded by our own cleverness, blinded by false perceptions of those qualities that we term eternity and infinity. There is another factor that explains it all, and once this universal factor is recognized, everything grows simple. There is no longer any mystery, no longer any wonder, no longer any doubt; for the simplicity of it all lies before us - "
 
 
 
(Clifford D. Simak: "A Heritage of Stars")

"We came into a homeless frontier, a place where we were not welcome, where nothing that lived was welcome, where thought and logic were abhorrent and we were frightened, but we went into this place because the universe lay before us, and if we were to know ourselves, we must know the universe..." 

(Clifford D. Simak: "A Heritage of Stars")



"... if mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology." 

(Clifford D. Simak: "A Heritage of Stars")



"...  Horton (said:). "Time is still the great mystery to us. It is no more than a concept; we don't know if it even exists...""
(Clifford Simak: "Shakespeare's Planet")

 
 


"The man (George Sutton) nudged him in the arm. "One thing more, son. Do you believe in God?"
Slowly Frost put the spoon back into the bowl.
He asked: "You really want an answer?"
"I want an answer," said the man. "I want an honest one."
"The answer," said Frost, "is that I don't know. Not, certainly, in the kind of God that you are thinking of. Not the old white-whiskered, woodcut gentleman. But a supreme being - yes, I would believe in a God of that sort. Because it seems to me there must be some sort of force or power or will throughout the universe. The universe is too orderly for it to be otherwise. When you measure all this orderliness, from the mechanism of the atom at one end of the scale, out to the precision of the operation of the universe at the other end, it seems unbelievable that there is not a supervisory force of some kind, a benevolent ruling force to maintain that sort of order.""
 
(Clifford D. Simak: "Why Call Them Back From Heaven?")


"Could it be possible, Hezekiah asked himself, that there was no room for both the faith and truth, that they were mutually exclusive qualities that could not coexist? He shuddered as he thought of it, for if this should be the case, they had spent their centuries of devotion to but little purpose, pursuing a will-o'-the-wisp. Must faith be exactly that, the willingness and ability to believe in the face of a lack of evidence? If one could find the evidence, would then the faith be dead? If that were the situation, then which one did they want? Had it been, he wondered, that men had tried what they even now were trying and had realized that there was no such thing as truth, but only faith, and being unable to accept the faith without its evidence, had dropped the faith as well?"

(Clifford Simak: "A Choice of Gods", Chapter 7)

 


"(Excerpt from journal of Nov. 29, 5036)...
... In the process I have become a student of the sky and know all the clouds there are and have firmly fixed in mind the various hues of blue that the sky can show - the washed-out, almost invisible blue of a hot, summer noon; the soft robin's egg, sometimes almost greenish blue of a late springtime evening, the darker, almost violet blue of fall. I have become a connoisseur of the coloring that the leaves take on in autumn and I know all the voices and the moods of the woods and river valley. I have, in a measure, entered into communion with nature, and in this wise have followed in the footsteps of Red Cloud and his people, although I am sure that their understanding and their emotions are more fine-tuned than mine are. I have seen, however, the roll of seasons, the birth and death of leaves, the glitter of the stars on more nights than I can number and from all this as from nothing else I have gained a sense of a purpose and an orderliness which it does not seem to me can have stemmed from accident alone.
It seems to me, thinking of it, that there must be some universal plan which set in motion the orbiting of the electrons about the nucleus and the slower, more majestic orbit of the galaxies about one another to the very edge of space. There is a plan, it seems to me, that reaches out of the electron to the rim of the universe and what this plan may be or how it came about is beyond my feeble intellect. But if we are looking for something on which to pin our faith - and, indeed, our hope - the plan might well be it. I think we have thought too small and have been too afraid..."
(Clifford Simak: "A Choice of Gods", Chapter 24)

""Father, at the very start I made it plain to you that I was not inclined to be a religious sort of man - not in the accepted sense, that is. And I played square with you."
"So you did," said Father Flanagan.
"And if your next question is going to be: Could a religious man go out to the stars and still retain his faith; could he go out and come back full of faith; would travelling to the stars take away something of the true belief he held? Then I'd have to ask you to define your terms."
"My terms?" asked Father Flanagan amazed.
"Yes, faith, for one thing. What do you mean by faith? Is faith enough for Man? Should he be satisfied with faith alone? Is there no way of finding out the truth? Is the attitude of faith, of believing in something for which there can be no more than philosophic proof, the true mark of a Christian? Or should the Church long since - "
Father Flanagan raised a hand. "My son!" he said. "My son!"
"Forget it, Father. I should not have said it.""
 
(Clifford D. Simak: "Time is the Simplest Thing")

"Once again the universe was spread far out before him and it was a different and in some ways a better universe, a more diagrammatic universe, and in time, he knew, if there were such a thing as time, he'd gain some completer understanding and acceptance of it.
He probed and sensed and learned and there was no such thing as time, but a great foreverness.
He thought with pity of those others locked inside the ship, safe behind its insulating walls, never knowing all the glories of the innards of a star or the vast panoramic sweep of vision and of knowing far above the flat galactic plane.
Yet he really did not know what he saw or probed; he merely sensed and felt it and became a part of it, and it became a part of him - he seemed unable to reduce it to a formal outline of fact or of dimension or of content. It still remained a knowledge and a power so overwhelming that it was nebulous. There was no fear and no wonder, for in this place, it seemed, there was neither fear nor wonder. And he finally knew that it was a place apart, a world in which the normal space-time knowledge and emotion had no place at all and a normal space-time being could have no tools or measuring stick by which he might reduce it to a frame of reference.
There was no time, no space, no fear, no wonder - and no actual knowledge, either."
 

(Clifford D. Simak: "All the Traps of Earth")

"... Perhaps all that had happened had been no more than the working out of human destiny. If the human race could not attain directly the paranormal power he held, this instinct of the mind, then they would gain it indirectly through the agency of one of their creations. Perhaps this, after all, unknown to Man himself, had been the prime purpose of the robots.
He turned and walked slowly down the length of village street, his back turned to the ship and the roaring of the captain, walked contentedly into this new world he'd found, into this world that he would make - not for himself, nor for robotic glory, but for a better Mankind and a happier.
Less than an hour before he'd congratulated himself on escaping all the traps of Earth, all the snares of Man. Not knowing that the greatest trap of all, the final and the fatal trap, lay on this present planet.
But that was wrong, he told himself. The trap had not been on this world at all, nor any other world. It had been inside himself.
He walked serenely down the wagon-rutted track in the soft, golden afternoon of a matchless autumn day, with the dog trotting at his heels.
Somewhere, just down the street, the sick baby lay crying in its crib."
 
 
 

(Clifford D. Simak: "All the Traps of Earth")

"...my (characters) are quite ordinary folk having in their makeups the same weaknesses and strengths as are found in most of us..."
"I like (losers) because they are much more interesting than winners..."
 

(Clifford D. Simak: Foreword to "Skirmish")

"And that had not been the first time nor  had it been the last, but all the years of killing  boiled down in  essence  to that single moment-not the time that came after, but that long and terrible instant when he had watched the lines of men purposefully striding up the slope to kill him.
     It  had been in that  moment that he (Enoch) had realized  the insanity of war, the futile gesture  that in time became all but meaningless, the unreasoning rage that must be  nursed  long beyond the memory of  the incident that  had caused the rage,  the sheer  illogic that one man, by death of misery, might prove a right or uphold a principle.
     Somewhere, he thought, on the long backtrack of history, the human race had accepted an insanity for a principle and had persisted in it until today that  insanity-turned-principle stood  ready to  wipe  out, if not  the race itself, at least all of those things, both material and immaterial, that had been fashioned as symbols of humanity through many hard-won centuries."
 

(Clifford D. Simak: "Way Station")

"The sun was setting, throwing a fog-like dusk across the stream and trees, and there was a coolness in the air. It was time, I knew, to be getting back to camp. But I did not want to move. For I had the feeling that this was a place, once seen, that could not be seen again. If I left and then came back, it would not be the same; no matter how many times I might return to this particular spot the place and feeling would never be the same, something would be lost or something would be added, and there never would exist again, through all eternity, all the integrated factors that made it what it was in this magic moment."
(Clifford D. Simak: "Cemetery World",
(orig. publ. in three parts in Analog, Nov., Dec. 1972, Jan. 1973;
New York, Putnam, 1973; a novel;
Berkley Medallion Books, New York 1974, p. 39)

"(The census-taker, or Ronex from the planet Abernax, said:) ".... I find it a most intriguing and amusing thing that it might be possible to package the experiences, not only of one's self, but of other people. Think of the hoard we might then lay up against our later, lonely years when all old friends are gone and the opportunity for new experiences have withered. All we need to do then is to reach up to a shelf and take down a package that we have bottled or preserved or whatever the phrase might be, say from a hundred years ago, and uncorking it, enjoy the same experience again, as sharp and fresh as the first time it had happened....
I have tried to imagine ... the various ingredients one might wish to compound in such a package. Beside the bare experience itself, the context of it, one might say, he should want to capture and hold all the subsidiary factors which might serve as a background for it - the sound, the feel of wind and sun, the cloud floating in the sky, the color and the scent. For such a packaging, to give the desired results, must be as perfect as one can make it. It must have all those elements which would be valuable in invoking the total recall of some event that had taken place many years before...""

(Clifford D. Simak: "Cemetery World",
(orig. publ. in three parts in Analog, Nov., Dec. 1972, Jan. 1973;
New York, Putnam, 1973; a novel;
Berkley Medallion Books, New York 1974, p. 147)

""As an auxiliary to all of this," he said, "I have found myself speculating upon a world in which no one ever grew up. I admit, of course, that it is a rather acrobatic feat of thinking, not entirely consistent, to leap from the one idea to the other. In a world where one was able to package his experiences, he merely would be able to relive at some future time the experiences of the past. But in a world of the eternally young he'd have no need of such packaging. Each new day would bring the same freshness and the everlasting wonder inherent in the world of children. There would be no realization of death and no fear born of the knowledge of the future. Life would be eternal and there'd be no thought of change. One would exist in an everlasting matrix and while there would be little variation from one day to the next, one would not be aware of this and there'd be no boredom...""

(Clifford D. Simak: "Cemetery World",
(orig. publ. in three parts in Analog, Nov., Dec. 1972, Jan. 1973;
New York, Putnam, 1973; a novel;
Berkley Medallion Books, New York 1974, p. 148)
 "A wrongness persisted, a sense of aberration, some factor not quite right, the feeling of a corner. But Boone could not pin it down; there seemed no way to reach it."
(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway of Eternity", 
New York, Ballantine Books 
(A Del Rey Book) 1986. 
first mass market edition 1988; p. 20)

"A dull thud hit them, buckling them at the knees, and the plaster of the suite began to crack, fissures starting at the corners of the ceiling to run obliquely across it. The floor began to sag.
Boone grasped desperately at Corcoran, throwing both arms around him tightly.
And they were in another place, in another suite, a suite where there was no plaster cracking, no slumping of the floor.
Corcoran pulled angrily away from Boone. "What the hell was that?" he shouted. "Why did you grab...?"
"The Everest is going down," said Boone. "Look out the window. See the dust."
"It can't be. We're still in the Everest."
"Not any longer," said Boone. "We're in that box you saw. We stepped around a corner.""

(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 21-22)

"(Boone said:) "... Every time before, I stepped into a sort of limbo - a gray, flat world of some kind of fog, with no real features. But this time, we stepped into a real place - this box. I can't be entirely sure, but I think I'm right.""
(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 22)

"(Timothy said:)"... We're very close to immortal, you know. The time mechanism keeps it that way."
"No, I hadn't known," said Boone.
"Inside the time bubble we do not age. We age only when we are outside of it.""

(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 34)

""They (human race) changed," said Enid, "from corporeal beings, from biological beings, to incorporeal beings, immaterial, pure intelligences. They now are ranged in huge communities on crystal lattices...""

(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 37)

"What your friend told you of his seeing of the time wall is true, Henry said in Boone's mind. I know he saw it, although imperfectly. Your friend is most unusual. So far as I know, no other human actually can see it; although there are ways of detecting time. I tried to show him a sniffler. There are a number of snifflers, trying to sniff out the bubble. They know there's something strange, but don't know what it is."

(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 43-44)

""We have time travel," she (Enid) said, "and none of us, I am sure, really understands it. We stole it from the Infinites. To steal time travel was the one way we could fight back, the one way we could flee. The human race had far space travel before the Infinites showed up. I think it was our far travel that aroused the interest of the Infinites in us. I've often wondered if some of the very primitive principles of time might not have made our many-times-faster-than-light travel possible. Time is somehow tied into space, but I have never known quite how.""

(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 60)

"He (Boone) stirred again, halfway between sleep and wakefulness, and he was not alone. Across the fire from him sat, or seemed to sit, a man wrapped in some all-enveloping covering that might have been a cloak, wearing on his head a conical hat that dropped down so far it hid his face. Beside him sat the wolf - the wolf, for Boone was certain that it was the same wolf with which he'd found himself sitting nose to nose when he had wakened the night before. The wolf was smiling at him, and he had never known that a wolf could smile.
He stared at the hat. Who are you? What is this about?
He spoke in his mind, talking to himself, not really to the hat. He had not spoken aloud for fear of startling the wolf.
The Hat replied. It is about the brotherhood of life. Who I am is of no consequence. I am only here to act as an interpreter.
An interpreter for whom?
For the wolf and you.
But the wolf does not talk.
No, he does not talk. But he thinks. He is greatly pleased and puzzled.
Puzzled I can understand. But pleased?
He feels a sameness with you. He senses something in you that reminds him of himself. He puzzles what you are.
In time to come, said Boone, he will be one with us. He will become a dog.
If he knew that, said The Hat, it would not impress him. He thinks now to be one with you. An equal. A dog is not your equal..."
(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 79-80)

"Perversity, she (Enid) thought. Could that have been what happened to the human race - a willing perversity that set at naught all human values which had been so hardly won and structured in the light of reason for a span of more than a million years? Could the human race, quite out of hand and with no sufficient reason, have turned its back upon everything that had built humanity? Or was it, perhaps, no more than second childhood, a shifting of the burden off one's shoulders and going back to the selfishness of the child who romped and frolicked without thought of consequence or liability?"

(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 95)

""It is a net," said Horseface, "useful for the fishing of the universe."
Enid crinkled up her face, staring at what he called a net. It was a flimsy thing and it had no shape.
"Certainly," she said, "you would not go fishing the universe in so slight a thing as this."
"Time means nothing to it," said Horseface, "nor does space. It is independent of both time and space except as it makes use of them.""

(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 103-104)

"Boone gulped and swallowed. He spoke to The Hat. "You said the Highway to Eternity?"
That is not what I said. I said the Highway of Eternity.
"Small difference," Boone told him.
Not so small as you might think."

(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 157)

""This is the core of the galaxy," Horseface said. "This is the very center of everything there is. A huge black hole eating up the galaxy. The end of everything."
A bitter wind was blowing, although there should not have been a wind. It had the icy chill of emptiness, the black glacial kiss of death. It could be, Boone thought, the black frost of defeated Time fleeing from the annihilation eating at the center."

(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 172)

""Much of what we see in the universe," said Hugo, "starts out as imaginary. Often you must imagine something before you can come to terms with it.""
(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 218)

"(Henry said:) ... an untold time ago, there was a well-founded perception that the human race would end and that something else must take its place.
(The tree said:) Why must something else take its place?
(Henry said:) I cannot tell you that. There is no solid rationale for it, but the belief seemed to be that there must be a dominant race upon this planet. Before men were the dinosaurs and before the dinosaurs there were the trilobites..."

(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 264)

"(Enid said:) "... Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would lack meaning.""

(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 276)

 
Links


Photo of Clifford Simak taken by Jay Kay Klein

Parallel Worlds of Clifford D. Simak

Excerpts from Simak's Travels into Parallel Worlds

Cover art from some Clifford Simak's books in Czech language

Clifford Simak's Awards and Writings

Strucna ceska bibliografie Clifforda D. Simaka

 

Paul Bramscher's main Simak Fan Page
 

Scott Henderson's complete listing of C. Simak's stories


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