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I Am Crying All Inside: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 1) Kindle Edition
People work; folk play. That is how it has been in this country for as long as Sam can remember. He is happy, and he understands that this is the way it should be. People are bigger than folk. They are stronger. They do not need food or water. They do not need the warmth of a fire. All they need are jobs to do and a blacksmith to fix them when they break. The people work so the folk can drink their moonshine, fish a little, and throw horseshoes. But once Sam starts to wonder why the world is like this, his life will never be the same.
Along with the other stories in this collection, “I Am Crying All Inside” is a compact marvel—a picture of an impossible reality that is not so different from our own.
Also included in this volume is the newly published “I Had No Head and My Eyes Were Floating Way Up in the Air,” originally written for Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions.™
Each story includes an introduction by David W. Wixon, literary executor of the Clifford D. Simak estate and editor of this ebook.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherOpen Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
- Publication dateOctober 20, 2015
- File size4475 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Like Olaf Stapledon and SF’s later mystics, Simak could dream on a grand scale. . . . Thoreau or Wordsworth would feel at home in his isolated houses rooted in natural landscapes.” —Locus
“Simak is the most underrated great science fiction writer alive, and has never written a bad book.” —Theodore Sturgeon
“I read [Simak’s] stories with particular attention, and I couldn’t help but notice the simplicity and directness of the writing—the utter clarity of it. I made up my mind to imitate it, and I labored over the years to make my writing simpler, clearer, more uncluttered, to present my scenes on a bare stage.” —Isaac Asimov
“Without Simak, science fiction would have been without its most humane element, its most humane spokesman for the wisdom of the ordinary person and the value of life lived close to the land.” —James Gunn
About the Author
During his fifty-five-year career, CLIFFORD D. SIMAK produced some of the most iconic science fiction stories ever written. Born in 1904 on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin, Simak got a job at a small-town newspaper in 1929 and eventually became news editor of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, writing fiction in his spare time.
Simak was best known for the book City, a reaction to the horrors of World War II, and for his novel Way Station. In 1953 City was awarded the International Fantasy Award, and in following years, Simak won three Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award. In 1977 he became the third Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and before his death in 1988, he was named one of three inaugural winners of the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.
DAVID W. WIXON was a close friend of Clifford D. Simak’s. As Simak’s health declined, Wixon, already familiar with science fiction publishing, began more and more to handle such things as his friend’s business correspondence and contract matters. Named literary executor of the estate after Simak’s death, Wixon began a long-term project to secure the rights to all of Simak’s stories and find a way to make them available to readers who, given the fifty-five-year span of Simak’s writing career, might never have gotten the chance to enjoy all of his short fiction. Along the way, Wixon also read the author’s surviving journals and rejected manuscripts, which made him uniquely able to provide Simak’s readers with interesting and thought-provoking commentary that sheds new light on the work and thought of a great writer.
Product details
- ASIN : B010EMZW06
- Publisher : Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy (October 20, 2015)
- Publication date : October 20, 2015
- Language : English
- File size : 4475 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 347 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #139,695 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #151 in Science Fiction Anthologies (Kindle Store)
- #1,370 in Short Stories Anthologies
- #1,891 in Science Fiction Adventure
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
During his fifty-five-year career, Clifford D. Simak produced some of the most iconic science fiction stories ever written. Born in 1904 on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin, Simak got a job at a small-town newspaper in 1929 and eventually became news editor of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, writing fiction in his spare time. Simak was best known for the book City, a reaction to the horrors of World War II, and for his novel Way Station. In 1953 City was awarded the International Fantasy Award, and in following years, Simak won three Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award. In 1977 he became the third Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and before his death in 1988, he was named one of three inaugural winners of the Horror Writers Association's Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.
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There seems to be no rhyme or reason to Wixon’s arrangement of the stories and novellas within the series. The ten selections in Volume One are not ordered chronologically. They run the gamut from 1939 to 1969, plus one story which was previously unpublished. There is no thematic cohesion to the entries either. In fact, there’s even one Western tale included among all the science fiction. As someone who appreciates vintage sci-fi but has had little experience with Simak, the grab-bag approach worked just fine for me. It was a joy to begin each story with no expectation of where Simak would go with it. By putting himself in Simak’s hands, the reader straps himself in for a roller coaster ride of visionary speculation, thrilling entertainment, and intellectual stimulation.
Simak’s range of subjects and interests is admirably diverse. “Installment Plan” is a tale of economic competition and industrial espionage, but on a distant planet. “Ogre” deals with intelligent plant life and alien music. “Small Deer” and “Gleaners” are two great time travel tales, the former horrific and the latter almost comic. There’s a whole lot of weird science going on in “Call from Beyond,” but it comes across as a film noir set on Pluto. The previously unpublished selection, “I Had No Head and My Eyes Were Floating Way Up in the Air” is a brilliantly creepy sci-fi/horror masterpiece. “Madness from Mars” is the one story that feels a little antiquated and formulaic, but Simak still manages to inject it with some thought-provoking ideas.
There’s a strain of dark pessimism that runs through a lot of the stories, even the Western, “Gunsmoke Interlude.” However, there’s also a resilient and enduring humanity that shines through, regardless of whether the characters are human, animal, vegetable, or synthetic beings. What separates Simak from so many of the sci-fi writers of his era is his ability not only to create fantastic worlds but also to enrich them with moving emotion. “I Am Crying All Inside” and “All the Traps of Earth” both feature robot protagonists who are more sympathetic and heartbreaking than many of their human counterparts in literature.
This is quite simply one of the best short story collections I’ve read in years, science fiction or otherwise. I’m definitely down for Volume Two. Kudos to Wixon and Open Road for putting together this comprehensive series of the Grand Master’s work. If this first volume is any indication of the quality to expect in volumes to come, I may just work my way through all 14 books.
This collection contains stories originally published between 1943 and 1969, plus one short first published in this 2015 book.
I find this to be a very strong collection, filled with invention, golden age excitement, and better-than-Golden-Age character development. I will definitely read and review more of Simak’s work. I’m also tempted to pick up his two most famous novels City and Way Station.
The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak is rated 80%.
7 good / 2 average / 1 poor.
Installment Plan
Good. A business man and his robot team find difficulty on a trade mission to a semi-primitive planet.
I Had No Head and My Eyes Were Floating Way Up in the Air
Good. Original written for the Harlan Ellison collection “Last, Dangerous Visions.” A man comes to exploit a planet, but finds himself the victim of a horrible vengeful forced transformation. A great story full of violent energy.
Small Deer
Good. A man invents a time machine and discovers the real reason the dinosaurs went extinct.
Ogre
Good. Earth audiences are enraptured by the music created by alien singing trees. A group of men try to capitalize on this situation, but find that the alien trees might have plans of their own.
Gleaners
Good. A time-travel company grabbed artifacts from the path for profit. This story details an unusual day in the life of one of the executives that manage this program.
Madness from Mars
Good. A beautiful and haunting story of a spaceship that returns from Mars with a crew that went mad an killed themselves. The reason why and the solution will break your heart.
Gunsmoke Interlude
Poor. A non-scifi western story about a stranger that would give up his gun.
I Am Crying All Inside
Average. Robots and rednecks make moonshine.
The Call from Beyond
Average. A fun little action story of a man who arrives on Mars to discover that people he thought we dead are actually alive. And they are up to no good.
All the Traps of Earth
Good. Wonderful tale of a robot who has been illegally allowed to keep his memories for 600 years, instead of the normal human lifespan. He flees earth and discovers a new purpose and mission to his life.
From ShortSF Reviews
Each of these stories is worthwhile. Not a clunker among them. There are some rather antiquated ideas, a fair amount of unconscious sexism where women are mostly background accessories and men do the important things, and then there are the robots. Their dialogue is pretty much what you'd expect from humans of the time, except for the robots in one of the stories. These are not Asimov's robots by any means. But they do provide another perspective and sometimes comic relief. I'm not getting into all the social issues and what robots might be representing here. But suffice it to say they seem a lot like the servants, porters, cooks, and menials played in Hollywood movies by many African Americans in movies of that era. There was one racist comment that I noticed but in those days no white person would have had any problem with it. So our perspective has changed since the days when Simak was writing. He is a product of his time as are his stories. If we look at it from this perspective, then the stories can be enjoyable and also provide a look into the mindset of e day gone by.
Top reviews from other countries
L'unico difetto della raccolta è che i racconti non sono in ordine cronologico, ma forse questo era inevitabile se si volevano fare volumi omogenei...