Wed 3 May 2017
A Science Fiction Review: CLIFFORD D. SIMAK – Shakespeare’s Planet.
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Science Fiction & Fantasy[8] Comments
CLIFFORD D. SIMAK – Shakespeare’s Planet. Berkley/Putnam, hardcover, 1976. Berkley, paperback; 1st printing, May 1977. Del Rey, paperback, 1982.
Back in my teens and 20s when I was reading SF by the armload, two of my favorites were, of course, Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. I say “of course” because those were the two authors that my SF-reading friends were also reading (all two of them).
But as time went on and I started reading Astounding and Galaxy and some of the other magazines that came out around then, I started finding other authors that appealed to me even more than the big two. (I won’t go into who the “Big Three” might be.)
As you may have guessed by now, this is when I discovered Clifford D. Simak. He wrote simple stories about some not so simple ideas, and what’s more he made them sound simple. I grew up in a small town in the Midwest (Michigan), and Simak was if nothing else a master of small town ideas and values, and of creating characters who believed in them, no matter how far out in time or space they happened to be.
Shakespeare’s Planet is a prime example. It begins with Carter Horton waking up on an expeditionary spaceship as the only survivor of four humans on board. His only companions, if you will, being a robot named Nicodemus and a ship named Ship, controlled by the minds of three people who gave up their bodies for the voyage: a monk, a scientist and a grande dame.
The planet the ship has found is inhabited, as it turns out, by an alien creature named Carnivore. Recently deceased is a human dubbed Shakespeare from the book of plays he owned. Tunnels in space have led to this world, but something has gone awry, as they function only in one direction: in, not out.
And the ship cannot return to Earth, which is now 1000 years away. One new arrival to the planet after Horton is Elayne, a female explorer of the tunnels through space. She is also trapped with the others. But there are other beings on the planet, each more fantastic than the next, nor do they get along as well as those already described.
Before the book ends there is a lot of discussion of life, the universe, and the role of humanity in it. Some of this discussion may be dismissed by some as being on the level of sophomores living in a college dormitory, but Simak has a way of making it seem a whole lot more than that — he works with a canvas the size of the entire cosmos –and if I could explain what he does any better than that, I’d be writing SF instead of only reading it.
May 3rd, 2017 at 4:43 am
Simak’s City has a wonderful running joke: superintelligent scholarly dogs discussing whether Man actually existed or was a mythical being, which means we get sentences like: “Rover maintains… On the other hand, Spot says… Fido’s theory is…”
May 3rd, 2017 at 6:46 am
Simak has been a favorite of mine since I read CITY in the 1950s. Good to see a review here of one of his books.
May 3rd, 2017 at 10:45 am
CITY is one of the science fiction classics of all time, no doubt about it.
May 3rd, 2017 at 5:12 pm
Simak has been a favorite science fiction writer since first reading WAY STATION 40 years ago. He is so imaginative, and so lyrical.
This review captured why he is so interesting.
Haven’t read Shakespeare’s Planet yet. Am adding it to the to-be-read queue.
May 3rd, 2017 at 9:03 pm
Ahem, first, Clarke is the third of “the big three”, always was, still is, no doubt.
I have this book in the SF Book Club edition, and read it many years ago. City is still my favorite of his, I think, and for shorter work “The Big Front Yard”.
May 3rd, 2017 at 9:50 pm
I’m sure that Clarke is the consensus choice for Number Three, but his work always seemed cold and aloof to me.
May 3rd, 2017 at 9:40 pm
Simak is one of those writers whose quiet competence too often conceals how good they really are. Like Hal Clement I always felt he deserved a higher position in the SF hierarchy than historians and genre critics give him.
May 3rd, 2017 at 9:57 pm
I think Simak is probably unknown to the current generation of SF readers, but in his day, his work was very well thought of. He was in fact the third author awarded the title of Grand Master by the SFWA. I did not know this before!
1975 Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988)
1976 Jack Williamson (1908–2006)
1977 Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988)
For the others, here’s Wikipedia to the rescue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damon_Knight_Memorial_Grand_Master_Award