Buckets of Diamonds and Other Stories: The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak, Volume Thirteen

Lucky Thirteen

After making us wait six years since Volume 12 was released, editor David W. Wixon and publisher Open Road Media have finally released volumes 13 and 14 of The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak series. During that time, I got tired of waiting for Wixon, so I tracked down and read all of Simak’s remaining sci-fi stories, but it is nice to see the series finally finished, and I am happy to own the complete set of inexpensive ebooks. I read Volume 14 first because it was a Kindle Daily Deal, so I am now wrapping up the series with Volume 13.

Volume 13 collects ten stories by Simak, nine of them science fiction and one a Western. The Western, a novella-length work entitled “The Fighting Doc of Bushwhack Basin,” is one of the longest entries in this volume, but it’s a pretty good one. A town doctor gets tired of patching up gunshot wounds caused by trigger-happy hired guns, so he decides to go after the wealthy rancher who hired them. The dozen-or-so Western stories that Simak published in his career tend to repeat a lot of the same elements, but if you haven’t read one of his Westerns in a while then this is an enjoyably suspenseful adventure.

The main attraction here, however, is the science fiction, and this volume contains at least half a dozen good stories in that vein. Habitual Simak readers will recognize “The Trouble with Ants,” a story that eventually became the penultimate chapter of his novel City. Thousands of years in the future, after mankind has left the Earth, the planet belongs to robots, dogs, and other animals, who barely remember the existence of man. In this installment of the City saga, ants also become a major player in the planet’s future. Like the other stories that went into the making of that classic novel, this is some of Simak’s most visionary and original work.

Volume 13’s title selection, “Buckets of Diamonds,” is like a comedic Twilight Zone episode in which the narrator’s goofy uncle mysteriously comes into possession of great riches. “The Marathon Photograph” entwines elements of mystery, horror, and science fiction into an ingenious story full of intriguing ideas, while “Infiltration” delivers good old-fashioned monster-movie fun. Perhaps the best story in the volume is “. . . And the Truth Shall Make You Free.” In a future in which mankind is just one insignificant inhabitant of a diverse galaxy, an interplanetary team of explorers discovers archaeological evidence of the first humans who left Earth thousands of years earlier. A human member of the team hopes the find will shed light on the glory and purpose of mankind. This story is quintessential Simak, a philosophical reconciling of his interest in futuristic sci-fi and his love of a pastoral Midwestern lifestyle.

“Horrible Example,” “Clerical Error,” and “Shadow of Life” are less successful entries by Simak standards but still pretty good for the genre. It’s hard to find a short story collection where every entry hits the ball out of the park. After having now read all 14 volumes of The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak series, however, I can honestly say there isn’t a bad book in the bunch. Volume 13 isn’t the best volume in the series, but if you’re a science fiction fan you really can’t go wrong with purchasing any of these books, especially since they turn up so often as Kindle Daily Deals.

Stories in this collection

Horrible Example

Lobby

The Trouble with Ants

Buckets of Diamonds

The Fighting Doc of Bushwhack Basin

. . . And the Truth Shall Make You Free

Clerical Error

Shadow of Life

Infiltration

The Marathon Photograph

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My Childhood by Toivo Pekkanen

Poignant memoir of poverty and struggle in wartime Finland

In the late 1960s, the University of Wisconsin Press published its Nordic Translation Series, which introduced works of 20th century Scandinavian literature to English-language readers. Eleven books from that series are now available for free at the University of Wisconsin Libraries’ website, where one can read the texts online or download free ebooks. Most of these works are modernist in style, with the authors to some extent experimenting with language and literary form. My Childhood, however, is a straight-up work of old-school naturalism. In this partial autobiography, originally published in 1953, Finnish author Toivo Pekkanen (1902-1957) tells it like it is in clear prose with no ostentation or artifice. In doing so, he vividly brings to life the time and place of his youth and tells the heartbreaking story of his family’s struggle for survival.

Pekkanen was born in Kotka, a town on the southern coast of Finland near the Russian border. For most of this narrative, Finland was under the rule of the Russian Empire. Pekkanen’s father was a stonemason before suffering a stroke that hampered his ability work. Toivo’s early childhood recollections are the idyllic memories of youth, but his view of the world grows darker as his family descends into poverty. Toivo develops a love for books at an early age, but he is unable to pursue an education because of his family’s financial situation. He and his mother are forced to constantly hunt for work and food, sometimes having to resort to begging. The situation only worsens with the coming of World War I and the subsequent Russian Revolution, which bring with them political instability and food insecurity that plunges the entire nation into famine.

As any good memoir should, My Childhood strikes a fine balance between the universal and the specific. On the one hand, Pekkanen tells a coming-of-age story to which anyone can relate: how his childish view of life changed from the romantic to the realistic, how he grew to view his parents as human beings and accept them for their faults, his feelings as an outsider in the world, and his search for inner peace amid challenging circumstances. Pekkanen is able to articulate the thought processes of his younger self with incredible sensitivity and wisdom. Regardless of one’s upbringing, his is a childhood experience that any reader can relate to. On the other hand, this is a story that is specific to Finland, and one does learn quite a bit about Finnish history and Finnish life in the process. The historical details, however, never get in the way of the human narrative.

The plot description above may make My Childhood sound like a relentlessly depressing book, and to some extent it is. One can’t deny the harsh and brutal aspects of the story’s time, place, and situation. It is also, however, a tale of human resilience, one in which Pekkanen’s younger self always manages to find an iota of hope, strength, and perseverance to continue on. This is also a poignant story of family love. Despite the cards stacked against him, young Pekkanen learns to make peace with his lot in life without succumbing to it. At the end of this book, Pekkanen is about 17 and has decided to pursue writing. Calling to mind Leo Tolstoy’s autobiographical works Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, Pekkanen’s My Childhood reads as if it were just the first in a series of memoirs, but Pekkanen died four years after this work was published. If he had another memoir in mind, he never completed it. That’s a shame, because My Childhood is such a compelling read it will leave you wanting more.
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Twelve Stories and a Dream by H. G. Wells

A jack of all trades, master of some

In America at least (I think the case might be different in Britain), H. G. Wells is known for a very specific range of dark, pessimistic science fiction novels: The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man. Wells was a very prolific author, however, who wrote in a wide variety of genres, including crime stories, romance, humor, history, politics, and philosophy. Looking over his body of work, it seems that Wells never wanted to be ghettoized as a science fiction writer and therefore liked to stretch himself by venturing into other genres and forms, even those which are rather mundane compared to the fantastical visions he’s known for. Wells published over 80 short stories, which were gathered into six collections published during his lifetime. With perhaps one exception, these collections tend to be miscellaneous grab bags of all the genres Wells dabbled in, successfully or not. Such is the case with Twelve Stories and a Dream, published in 1903.

Though there are no tales of outer space or time travel in this volume, it does include other varieties of science fiction—natural science, chemistry, medical science—and these tend to be the collection’s most successful selections. “The Truth about Pyecraft” and “The New Accelerator” both involve medicinal potions that perform wonders but also result in the unexpected side effects of science gone wrong. “The Valley of Spiders” is like a good old-fashioned killer-animal monster movie. On the downside, “Filmer,” the story of an aviation pioneer, manages to take the wonder of flight and the excitement of mechanical invention and render them lethargic and boring. Too many stories in this volume venture into spiritualism and the supernatural—magic, ghosts, astral projection, fairies—where the atheistic Wells feels less than comfortable. Add to that a couple of crime stories, “Mr. Ledbetter’s Vacation” and “Mr. Brisher’s Treasure,” both comical in nature and moderately enjoyable in quality.

I tend to think that Wells is always at his best when he goes dark, bordering on horror, but maybe here he’s proved me wrong. One of the more satisfying entries in this book is “Miss Winchelsea’s Heart,” a silly comic romance that lampoons its own heroine with somewhat mean-spirited sarcasm. On the other hand, a story like “A Dream of Armageddon” should be right up Wells’s dystopian alley, but it ends up being one of the book’s weakest selections. The narrator meets a man on a train who tells him about a vividly realistic recurring dream he has had. The dream takes place in the future and involves a world war. Wells has little interesting to say about the future or the war, however, opting instead to dwell on a maudlin love story that’s familiar, boring, and pointless. And is the dream structure even necessary? Why not just tell a story set in the future? This a problem common to a lot of Wells’s stories: unnecessarily long setups before the tale even begins to be told.

Of Wells’s short story collections that I’ve read so far, I have liked Tales of Space and Time the best. The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents is another mixed bag of genres, but overall it’s slightly better than Twelve Stories and a Dream. In general, however, if I’m going to read a collection of short stories where science fiction is mixed in with a lot of other genres, I would opt for a volume by Arthur Conan Doyle, who exercises his versatility more successfully than Wells.

Stories in this collection

Filmer

The Magic Shop

The Valley of Spiders

The Truth About Pyecraft

Mr. Skelmersdale in Fairyland

The Inexperienced Ghost

Jimmy Goggles the God

The New Accelerator

Mr. Ledbetter’s Vacation

The Stolen Body

Mr. Brisher’s Treasure

Miss Winchelsea’s Heart

A Dream of Armageddon

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Wine of Life by Charles Gorham

Balzac: genius in literature, lovable loser in life

I know almost nothing about the author Charles Gorham, but this is the second book I’ve read by him. He was an American writer, born 1911, died in Connecticut in 1975, and the Library of Congress has him down for ten books. I had previously read The Gold of Their Bodies, Gorham’s biographical novel about the painter Paul Gauguin. Having enjoyed that book quite a bit, I sought out more of Gorham’s novels. Wine of Life, published in 1958, is Gorham’s fictionalized life story of the French writer Honoré de Balzac. Once again Gorham proves himself a skilled writer of the biographical novel with another book about an eccentric and uncompromising artistic genius who lived by his own rules.

Gorham presents a complete cradle-to-grave retelling of Balzac’s life, beginning with the Frenchman’s birth in Tours in 1799. Balzac experienced a sad childhood. Unloved by a mother who wanted nothing to do with him, he was sent off at a young age to a boarding school that resembled a prison and the teachers sadistic guards. Despite his mother’s shunning of him, or maybe because of it, Balzac strove for the rest of his life to earn her love and respect, at least in Gorham’s telling. Balzac did not decide to become a writer until after having studied to be a lawyer and pursuing several futile business ventures. The first half of Wine of Life is all about his struggle to become a published writer, and frankly that portion of the book is drawn out a bit too long. Anyone who’s ever read a biography of Balzac already knows about his ineptitude as a businessman, and it does tax one’s patience a bit to read three chapters about his failed printing business or pineapple farm. Though the pacing is a bit slow, however, Gorham’s talent for period realism and vivid characterization prevail, and once Balzac’s writing career gets off the ground, the second half of the book is a vast improvement.

Balzac was notoriously devoid of anything resembling fiscal responsibility. Though he was a success during his lifetime, he always spent more than he made, and he pushed himself like a flogged mule in a vain attempt to write enough words to pay off his debts. In depicting this aspect of Balzac’s personality, Gorham paints Balzac as a lovable loser whose extravagance is so ridiculous one has to laugh good-naturedly at his clueless optimism. Balzac’s relationships with women are also crucial to an understanding of his nature, and Gorham thoroughly chronicles his subject’s love life. A string of mistresses helped to mold Balzac’s character, further his career, and in some cases enable his excesses, but his one true love was the Polish countess Evalina de Hanska (that’s Gorham’s spelling). Rather than an overly romanticized account of the lovers’ protracted long-distance courtship, Gorham presents a portrait of the countess that is not very flattering. While Wine of Life contains a fair amount of sex and romance, Gorham treats such amorous matters realistically, never succumbing to sappy sentimentalism or bodice-ripping titillation.

I’m not sure how Gorham conducted his research into Balzac’s life, but it seems obvious that Mary Frances Sandars’s 1902 biography Honoré de Balzac: His Life and Writings was one of his sources. As a historical novelist, Gorham is like an unsung Gore Vidal. He strikes a fine balance between factual accuracy and literary license. He admirably recreates this time period in French history and teaches the reader a great deal about Balzac’s life while telling a satisfying, entertaining, and moving fictional narrative in the process. Literary scholars could probably quibble over some of the details and characterizations in Wine of Life (because that’s what literary scholars do), but most Balzac fans will enjoy it.  

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The Rise of David Levinsky by Abraham Cahan

Pioneering realist novel of a Jewish American immigrant’s experience

The Rise of David Levinsky, published in 1917, is a semiautobiographical novel by Abraham Cahan, a Jewish American writer who founded the Jewish Daily Forward newspaper. The book is a realist novel about a Russian Jewish immigrant who overcomes the struggles of assimilating into American society to become a successful businessman. (His success is revealed in the first chapter, so that’s not a spoiler). David Levinsky is born in 1865 in Antomir, a city in what was then part of Russia but is now Lithuania. His father dies when he is three years old, and David and his mother live a life of poverty. With some charitable assistance, David is able to attend school, and he becomes a scholar of the Talmud. After his mother’s death (a shocking event of unexplained brutality), David decides to emigrate to America. Barely scraping the money together for his passage, he arrives in New York with almost nothing. His dream is to attend college and become an educated man, but the demands of survival drive him into a career in business. Like many of his fellow Jewish immigrants in New York, Levinsky enters the garment trade, becoming a manufacturer of cloaks.

Historically, European and American literature has not been kind to the Jews, so by 1917 it was about time a Jewish writer got to tell a story of his own people, or at least that of a subset of Jewish society: the Jewish-American immigrant. Cahan doesn’t merely dip the reader’s toe into these waters; he provides a full-immersion view into the Jewish experience in New York. In this novel, emigration is a great leveling force that puts former aristocrats and paupers on equal footing in the New World. Orthodox ways are forgotten amidst the full-time American pursuit of making money. The candidness with which Cahan reveals the working, religious, romantic, and family lives of the Jewish community, its interior class struggles and the challenges of anti-Semitic discrimination, is an eye-opening experience for the non-Jewish reader and a valuable time capsule of Jewish life in America a century ago.

One of the most remarkable things about the novel is that Levinsky, its narrator and protagonist, isn’t really all that good of a person. He lies to friends and business associates in order to trick them into lending him money. He chases after married women. He sleeps with prostitutes. He disregards union rules and hires scab workers during a strike. He is an atheist who sometimes exaggerates his Jewish faith in order to get in good with other Jews. Levinsky is not a villain, but he does engage in selfish and unethical behavior, the kind that many people are guilty of in real life. It may not be unusual to find such honestly flawed characters in today’s literature, but it was certainly uncommon in American novels as early as 1917. It makes one wonder how autobiographical this novel is, since the portrait Cahan paints of Levinsky is not entirely flattering. It’s probably safe to say that the stuff about Levinsky’s youth in Antomir and his Talmudic studies is a reflection of Cahan’s own life, but everything having to do with the garment industry must be fiction, since Cahan was not a tailor but a writer, editor, and publisher.

Some portions of the novel drag on a little too long; Levinsky’s love affairs in particular. There is a weekend at a Catskills resort that feels like it lasts all summer long. Any lag in pacing, however, is made up for by the uncompromising realism of the work. The ending of the novel is especially frank and unromantic. The Rise of David Levinsky is an important work not only because of its pioneering view of Jewish life in America but also because it breaks so many old rules about what a novel should be or how a rags-to-riches story should be told. This is a groundbreaking work of American literary naturalism that deserves to be better known and more widely read.
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The Werewolf Principle by Clifford D. Simak

Classic Simak sci-fi (not really about werewolves)

For the last few years, I have been working my way through the complete works of American science fiction author Clifford D. Simak, and I’ve only got a few books left to go. I have to confess I was kind of avoiding The Werewolf Principle because of it’s title. Simak has a fancy for working mythical monsters from folklore and fantasy into many of his books (The Goblin Reservation, for example), not always successfully. It turns out, however, that The Werewolf Principle isn’t really about a werewolf, and it’s an excellent science fiction novel. The book was first published in 1967.

The story takes place on Earth about five hundred years in the future. Andrew Blake has no memory of his past or his identity. He was found in outer space, sealed inside a capsule, under suspended animation. Interstellar travel is not unusual in this distant future, but finding unidentified John Does in outer space certainly is. Blake is obviously a space traveler from Earth’s past, but how far in the past? He could possibly be centuries old. After a period of observation by doctors, Blake is discharged and granted a house in the suburbs of Washington, DC, complete with robot servants, in hopes that someday he will recover his memories. Instead of improving, however, Blake’s mental health seems to be deteriorating as he starts experiencing blackouts, hears voices in his head, and wakes up miles from home with no recollection of how he got there.

The “werewolf principle” is a phrase of scientific jargon coined by Earth’s Space Administration to describe a project involving the bioengineering of humans for space exploration. Through genetic manipulation, scientists have figured out a way to create human explorers that can transform into alien species in order to adapt to the varying conditions on other worlds—gravity, atmosphere, climate, radiation, etc. This is a concept Simak had explored previously in his novel City. There it is just one futuristic concept among many, but here in The Werewolf Principle it is the main focus of the book. Simak really explores this idea fully, following it to unexpected ramifications that lead to a constantly surprising, entertaining, and thought-provoking sci-fi thriller. I will refrain from further discussion of the book’s interesting plot points, however, so as not to spoil any surprises for the reader.

When Simak is in full-on science fiction mode (not fantasy), his stories have a satisfying logic to them. He has a knack for exploring visionary concepts through down-to-earth stories that render the unbelievable believable. Unlike most of Simak’s fiction, this novel is not set in the American Midwest, but nevertheless Simak does take time for some of his trademark scenes of rural life, treks through wilderness, fishing trips, and the like. His visions of the future may be technologically advanced, but he always stresses man’s relationship to nature as a necessity that must be cherished and protected through the centuries.

In the last couple pages of this novel, there is a surprise twist that I could’ve done without, but this book kept me fascinated for 99.5% of it’s length, so in my opinion it still merits a five-star rating. Amid Simak’s prolific and diverse output of works, The Werewolf Principle is a pleasant surprise and one of his better novels.
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