The Thing in the Stone : And Other Stories

Introduction Clifford D. Simak: Seeker After the Truth by David W. Wixon

Most people who have read a fair amount of Clifford D. Simak’s fiction will, if asked to give a succinct description of it, resort to mentioning robots, talking dogs, or pastoralism; few will speak of religion.

Probably that is because the term “religion,” when Simak uses it at all (and he does not actually use the very word all that often), may encompass a wide variety of subjects—from theology and philosophy, on the one hand, through ecclesiastical organizations to the most primitive of superstition. Sometimes one of those concepts will be front-and-center in a Simak story (for example Project Pope or “The Spaceman’s Van Gogh,” The Fellowship of the Talisman or “The Voice in the Void”), but often the “religious” concept is merely a part of the background, almost a sort of throwaway line. However, when viewed in the aggregate, it becomes obvious that all of those lines are there because they came to the mind of the author as he was writing. And the number of those occasions makes it clear in turn that the subject of religion was seldom far from Simak’s mind.

Perhaps strangely, this happened even though Simak was never a member of any organized religion or sect. (Occasionally one may find “biographical” essays about the author which state that he was a Roman Catholic; that is incorrect. Although Simak’s Czech ancestors almost certainly were Catholic—in fact, one of his prize possessions was an ancient rosary that, he told me, came down through the family from a very devout female ancestor—the family story had it that Cliff’s paternal grandfather had cut all ties with the Church following a loud disagreement with a parish priest. And they apparently never picked an alternative.)

But the Simak family had the habit of thoughtfulness, and Cliff’s parents, John and Maggie, engaged in a great deal of reading and discussion—including their two sons from an early age. And it seems clear that if the Simak family had given up the Church, they never gave up most of the principles, the underlying values, which they had learned. (Although it seems a mere detail, I have always been intrigued by the fact that the family’s stone, in the old Wisconsin country graveyard in which Cliff’s parents lie, is topped by a carved representation of an open book; almost certainly the book, a not-uncommon feature of grave markers of that era, represented a Bible, but I have a suspicion that to the family it had a more generalized meaning, too.)

As I said, Cliff Simak was not a churchgoer. But he was not blind to the concepts we associate with religion (in the most general sense of that word), such as spirituality.

In general, readers and critics seem to conclude that the sense of morality so strong in Simak stories is a “traditional” one; and while I will agree that Cliff was aware of and influenced by the mores of his time, I would suggest that his sense of morality did not so much result from traditional religion as from the application of the author’s common sense to the need of sentient beings to live with each other in the Universe. He used his mind to explore such concepts all through his life, and several times seemed to suggest that there might exist some sort of “universal” code of ethics that all intelligent beings could subscribe to. (Indeed, even in his last days, when writing was beyond him, one of the works he kept by his chair, to “dip into,” as he said—was the collected works of Thoreau … I suspect the two men, as writers and thinkers, had a lot in common.)

In light of the frequency with which “religious” ideas would appear in Clifford D. Simak’s stories, it is hardly surprising that the very first of his stories to see print, “The World of the Red Sun” (1931), revolved around an alien being who came to the Earth of the far future to find the human race fallen into a primitive state and who used his superior powers to set himself up as a god for humankind. And in “The Voice in the Void,” appearing the very next year, Simak gave an ugly portrayal of the religion of the Martians civilization.

The concept of repulsive primitive religions was, of course, hardly unique to Simak; it fact, it was a frequent feature of adventure fiction in his time. But in 1935, Simak raised a stir among science fiction fans with his story “The Creator,” which was seen as violating publishing taboos by portraying humans battling—and defeating—the being who had created our Universe. It would lead to the sardonic labeling of some of Cliff’s stories as his “sacrilegious” stories.

In the following years of his career, Simak used religion, or religious ideas, dozens of times: In “Rule 18” (1938), his protagonist, marooned in North America’s past, ends the story resolving to head south to become a god for the Aztecs; and in his first novel, Cosmic Engineers (1939), his time traveling Earthmen have to struggle with an godlike alien who is actually insane. And in one way or another, religion would appear, if only momentarily, in many other of his books and stories, including Project Pope, A Choice of Gods, Time and Again, Time Is the Simplest Thing, Way Station, Mastodonia, “Gleaners”—the list is long. (And yet, perhaps strangely, there seems to be no trace of such religious notions or influences in the well-known story-cycle known by its collective title, City.)

It should be made clear, however, that Clifford D. Simak, in his mentions of various “religious” ideas or practices, never really put forward any particular set of religious tenets beyond the suggestion, to which I referred earlier, that there might exist a universally applicable ethical code—indeed, Cliff, in his writing, is best described as agnostic.

But there was an idea that underlay most of Simak’s mentions of religion, and it was an idea that went beyond religion, and indeed beyond his science fiction: It was an iconoclasm that also condemned such societal institutions as law enforcement, politicians, banking, and business: the idea that humans have a tendency to cheat their fellows, to use positions of power to tyrannize them.

Cliff’s cynical view of religion, then, was not so much about the ideals of religion, of theology—as it was about the way humankind seems to always show a tendency to create “religious” organizations that are used to gain power or wealth for those “running” the organizations; he was unsparing in his depictions of churchmen supporting the rights of humans to take the land of nonhumans (Enchanted Pilgrimage); of “Bible Belt fanatics (The Werewolf Principle); of religious groups who sought to control time travel so as to be able to prevent others from learning the truth about the founding of Christianity (Mastodonia, “Gleaners”); of a “group of selfish, scheming leeches who fastened on the people” by creating a fraudulent religion during a time of societal privation (Enchanted Pilgrimage); of a monastery whose monks were “fat, lazy, and spongers off their neighbors (Fellowship of the Talisman);” of “professional religionists” who tried to manipulate a world-threatening crisis (Our Children’s Children); or “churchmen … inclined to shoot off their mouths in all directions and endlessly and without thought on any given subject” (The Visitors).

Do not make the mistake of thinking that Cliff Simak was against all religion; rather, he was concerned to point out how easy it was—and how usual—for people to corrupt religious impulses and ideals. It is notable, for instance, that his most sympathetic portrayal of religious ideas, in “The Spaceman’s Van Gogh,” involved a wandering artist who was pursuing a search for his religious ideal—that story, that search, had nothing to do with any ecclesiastical organization. (And if I may go out on a limb, I would suggest that “The Thing in the Stone” seems to hint at an alien version of Christianity’s Good Shepherd story.)

Humans, Cliff Simak said a number of times, seem to have a strong need for faith. But they do not seem to know how to find it, or how to use it if they do. This, he suggested in A Heritage of Stars, resulted in great danger to humans—as an alien character said in that book: “you have always been susceptible to gods.”

And let me close by noting that Cliff occasionally portrayed both aliens and robots as wanting to have souls, as humans do—in fact, those beings seemed to care more about having souls than did humans—almost as if humans, having souls, did not really appreciate them.

In particular, it is notable that in many of Cliff’s stories featuring robots, his robots carried names that seem Biblical to us—was that to illustrate that robots, unlike humans, were religiously innocent? (The only religious person in “All the Traps of Earth,” a minister approached by the robot protagonist for advice, was depicted as ineffectual, confused, and unwilling to commit on a moral issue.)

Humans, in Simak stories, usually seem to resent it when robots want to explore religious notions—in Shakespeare’s Planet, for instance, the three human brains who are running an interstellar ship resent the desire of the robot Nicodemus to offer prayers for humans who died on the journey. Nicodemus was likely named after a figure in the New Testament, a Pharisee and a leader of the Jewish people in the time of Jesus Christ, who was also a member of the Sanhedrin, the high court in Israel—according to the Gospel of John, Nicodemus came to Jesus by night to try to learn if Jesus was the Messiah … in short, Nicodemus was a seeker after the truth.