To all of you great Simak fans: I have spent many years working to get Cliff's stories into the public eye once more, and I'm very proud that we've had so much success... Yes, there have been delays and disappointments along the way, but I have to say that we've come farther than I dared hope -- in the early years of this 21st century I was told by a number of publishers and agents that no one in the SF business would take on such an unusual project. But the age of online publishing, along with the creation of Open Road Media and their hiring of Betsy Mitchell, eventually opened -- pun intended -- a road for me.
I guess it started, for me when Cliff passed away. He had asked me once, as the end neared, if I would want to take on the job of writing his biography, but I was reluctant, thinking that biography was not in my line. And then he ran out of time, at a time when I was three states away... I was not surprised, but I was still shocked.
Thereafter I agreed when his children asked me to run his literary estate, something I was well qualified to do, after my years of working with Gordon Dickson. But to do that, I needed to take inventory of what stories I had to work with, and I found that there were a lot of Simak stories that I had never read -- stories, some of them of which even he had lacked a copy. It took years to locate them all (and, in truth, I continue to be haunted by a feeling that's there's more out there, somewhere...). I had to learn what stories had been written, many of them before I was born and more when I was a child; and I had to get copies of them. That was the nineties.
Somewhere in there, I realized that many science fiction fans had, like me, never had the opportunity to read all those older stories, to learn what made Cliff Simak such a special writer in the earliest years of the genre. On a more personal level, I also wondered if there was a way to show those reader what had made my friend such a special person. I wanted to find some way to make those old stories, many of which had only been published one time (in those early pulp magazines), and never reprinted, available... I thought maybe I'd be able to get some of them reprinted -- perhaps in some specialized anthologies; but I needed to find the stories, and make copies, first...
Then I started typing them into my computer (and lost nine of them in a computer crash). And as I located them, read them, typed them, they got into my head, mixing there with other knowledge, and with my conversations with their author -- and somehow, all of that metamorphosed into the idea of finding a way to reprint ALL of them. That was the beginning of this new century.
All of them? I must have been mad. But my mind wouldn't let go of the idea. I wondered how many volumes they would require, and what sort of format would work. I worked my way through the few journals Cliff had left behind, which frustratingly had many long blank sections but occasionally contained mentions of stories he was working on...often with different titles, so I had to figure out, sometimes, just what story he was referring to when he made an interesting comment.
I had to decide on some order of presentation (I quickly rejected the idea of simple chronological order). I also had to fight with myself over whether to include the westerns and war stories. I had to find a format in which to present them all...I decided to make some introductory remark to each and every story. And then I found it necessary to write essays about aspects of Cliff's life...
In short, in trying to locate all the missing stories, I found myself having to delve into Cliff's (unwritten) biography after all. So I came to bitterly regret that I had not asked him more questions before he died. If so, this would have been a very different project.
I wish I could have done more. Many of Cliff's papers were deposited into the Archives at the University of Minnesota before his death, and many more papers exist. But I'm convinced that what is in all those papers is not the real Cliff -- his reserved personality did not allow him to open himself on paper to very many people; and that is why the biographical material I have inserted into the volumes of the Collection consists mainly of things he told me, in person, in those few years in which we could still sit together and just talk -- things which reading his old stories brought back out of my memory.
So, in an odd way, this 14-volume collection of Cliff Simak's stories is his biography. For a person like him, a collection of the data-points of his life would be a failure as a biography; it is my hope that presenting his short stories shows more of his personality than would simple data (including his novels would, yes, allow even more of his person to show up, but that would get rather unwieldly very quickly). For the fiction he wrote was highly personal to him -- he very much disliked talking with anyone about what he was working on; it was just too private, and that's why it is valuable for helping us look into his mind, and to see what he was thinking about and how his thinking moved along the path of his life. And that's also why he never went back to re-read his old work, and why he so seldom collaborated with other writers -- and why he so seldom wrote sequels or story-series. I think almost all of his stories show how his mind took up a concept and worked with it, working at its problem until he felt he had reached some sort of conclusion. And he generally did that all in the sanctuary of his own mind; very seldom did he open his thinking to anyone else until he was ready to send off a story -- and once he did that, he was seldom willing to revisit it.
