The Ghost of a Model T : And Other Stories

Clifford D. Simak and City: The Seal of Greatness by David W. Wixon

In this, the third volume of Clifford D. Simak’s collected short fiction, you find the story “City,” reprinted in its original magazine version.

If there is a single work for which Clifford D. Simak is most known, it is the book City. Most people call City a novel, but it is actually a compilation of eight short stories laced together by interstitial materials to form a work that functions as a novel. And since those eight stories were all once published individually, they are included as such in this volume.

Simak fans of a purist disposition may be pleased to know, however, that this collection features the original magazine versions of the stories from City. Most of them were altered, to various extents, for the book, which was put together some years later. But this volume preserves the original versions, heretofore unavailable.

As it happens, the earlier stories were not projected to be part of any series. “Desertion,” which appears as the fourth episode in City, was actually written before any of the others: Cliff’s journals show that it had been sold to John W. Campbell Jr. (who would publish the story in Astounding), before “City” itself was sent to him. This lends credence to the theory that “Desertion” was inserted into the series after the fact to provide a basis for the following story, Paradise.

The City stories, in their compiled form, demonstrate Clifford D. Simak’s passage from apprenticeship to craftsman as a writer. His own words confirm that transition: “From that time on, for the most part, I was in control of my writing efforts rather than floundering around, trying to find myself as a writer.”

Yet, he added, “there was still much that I had to learn.” And later, speaking of a time when he reread the City volume in its entirety, he said: “I ached to rewrite the tales.” But that, he continued, was unrealistic: “The ache to rewrite was a gut reaction—a sadness that in the ’40s I had not done as good a writing job as I could have done in the ’70s. I realized, however, that those stories could only have been written in the ’40s, that in the ’70s I would have been incapable of writing them. In the intervening years I undoubtedly had become a better writer, but I had lost something in the process.”

Thus, the author who wrote the version of “City” in this volume might be described as a different man, and a different writer, than the author who would pen his later works. But I sincerely hope that he is still someone you would like to know.