Epilog and Other Stories: The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak, Volume Fourteen

Capstone to an essential series

At long last, Open Road Media has finally released the final two volumes of The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak series. The series was designed to encompass fourteen volumes, but editor David W. Wixon has made us wait six years since Volume 12 was released. In the meantime, I got tired of waiting for Wixon, so I tracked down the rest of Simak’s science fiction stories (all the old pulp magazines have been scanned at the Internet Archive). It is nice, however, to finally see the series reach completion, and Wixon includes a western and a war story that I was unable to find. Because Volume 14 was offered as a Kindle daily deal, I read it before Volume 13.

Simak’s best-known novel, entitled City, was assembled from previously published short stories, and those stories have been distributed throughout the volumes of the Complete Short Fiction series. “Epilog” is an afterword to City that Simak wrote decades later and has since been added to subsequent editions of the novel. Taking place tens of thousands of years in the future, “Epilog” reveals the fate of Jenkins, the robot protagonist of City, and is one of the better stories in this collection.

“Rule 18,” a story about an interplanetary football game, won a retrospective Hugo Award 76 years after its original publication. I think it’s one of the less impressive stories in this volume, however, and it contains some unfortunate racial stereotypes. Among the best entries in Volume 14 is “Limiting Factor,” in which explorers discover the remnants of a technological civilization and attempt to reconstruct the details of the extinct alien culture. I generally wouldn’t consider overt comedy to be among Simak’s strengths, but Mr. Meek Plays Polo is a successful humorous effort in an interesting setting. The title character is a bookkeeper turned space tourist who stops for fuel at a Wild Western colony on the ring rocks of Saturn, where he is roped into participating in a “space polo” match. This volume also contains the novelette “The World That Couldn’t Be,” in which an Earthling homesteader on a far-off planet hunts down the alien beast who is eating his crops. The astrozoological aspects of the story allow Simak to propose an alternative theory of evolution that might exist on a distant world.

The western story in this volume, “Smoke Killer,” is fine but nothing special. Same with the World War II air combat tale, “A Bomb for No. 10 Downing,” which is built on an exciting premise but is too brief for much development. It is interesting to see these stories alongside Simak’s science fiction, but the latter genre is clearly where his talents lie.

To be honest, this isn’t one of the better volumes in this fourteen-volume series, but the series as a whole is so good overall that even a disappointing installment is better than most of the sci-fi anthologies out there. While Simak wrote a few excellent novels, the quality of his short stories on average surpasses that of his longer-form fiction. Thanks very much to Wixon and Open Road Media for publishing The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak series. It stands as an impressive monument to this sci-fi grand master’s prodigious talent and boundless visionary imagination.

Stories in this collection

Lulu

Smoke Killer

Shadow Show

Epilog

A Bomb for No. 10 Downing

Limiting Factor

Masquerade

The Fence

Rule 18

Mr. Meek Plays Polo

The World That Couldn’t Be

If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R255IKIYFXUOHS/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm