Tales of nostalgia and loss in a world overrun by technology

Hank is walking home from the bar when the Model T pulls alongside him. It's been decades since he saw a car this old, and the sound of it takes him right back to his twenties. The door is open, and when he climbs in, the car takes off-without a driver. Before he knows what's happened, Hank is right back at Big Spring Pavilion, where he spent his youth drinking bootleg whiskey and chasing pretty girls. He will find the past is not quite as he remembered it, but still a lovely place to go for a drive.

This collection includes some of the finest short fiction Clifford Simak ever wrote, including "City," the story that became the basis for his beloved novel of the same name. In the history of science fiction, no author has ever better understood that the Great Plains and the cosmos are closer together than we think.

Each story includes an introduction by David W. Wixon, literary executor of the Clifford D. Simak estate and editor of this book.

• Simak was the third person elected as a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America (after Robert A. Heinlein and Jack Williamson) and one of the inaugural winners of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Horror Writers of America
• Simak won the Hugo Award for his novel Way Station and the International Fantasy Award for his novel City
• This is the second volume in a projected 14-book series collecting all of Simak's short fiction
• The release of Simak's catalog in digital form in late 2015 has spurred a renaissance of interest in this classic author.

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.

Reviews
"To read science fiction is to read Simak. A reader who does not like Simak stories does not like science fiction at all." -Robert A. Heinlein

"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




Book Information
ISBN 9781504039468
Author Clifford D. Simak
Format Paperback
Page Count 332
Imprint Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Publisher Open Road Media