glasstatterdemalion's review
adventurous
funny
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.25
The Big Front Yard: And Other Stories is the second collection of Clifford D. Simak's short fiction, and one that I feel is a bit rougher than the first one. Unlike the first collection, none of the stories in this one really stuck out to me all that much.
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Spoilers below:
The Big Front Yard is an award-winning novelette, having won a Hugo in 1959, and is included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two. It's about a small-town antiquities seller and tinkerer who ends up making first contact with alien life, bringing humanity into a galactic system of ideas trading.
There's a bit going on here, mainly between the working class, rural protagonist and how he interacts with the rapidly industrializing world around him. The protagonist is part of a family that's been in the area for generations, but he owns only the family home and makes very little. He laments that at some point the forests and wilderness around him will be cut down, and there's not much that can be done to stop it. Despite his skills as a salesman and tinkerer, he makes little as opposed to a neighbor of his, a businessman who runs a computer plant and who admits that he can't do much but can pay people who can and that's why he's so wealthy.
To avoid reiterating the whole plot here, the narrative provides the protagonist with sole ownership of access to an alien world, one where he can use his full skills as a trader and barterer to begin trading solely in ideas, rather than wealth or resources he lacks, with the aliens he finds there.
I like the concepts behind the story, especially the idea that a working-class person can become the most important person in this situation due to actual skills rather than wealth or connections and that interactions with aliens could be based on something greater than capital. However, the story itself didn't really grab me, unfortunately.
The Observer is a rather short narrative, following a being slowly becoming aware of itself and its own memories.
The experimental nature of this story's structure was interesting, having a gradual expansion of concept and vocabulary as the titular observer began to understand more and more of itself and its surroundings, and the plot reasons for that. It reminded me of Simak's later I Had No Head and My Eyes Were Floating Way Up in the Air from the previous collection, which was originally written for Harlan Ellison's unfinished The Last Dangerous Visions anthology, which I feel took the idea and developed it a bit more.
Trail City's Hot-Lead Crusaders is one of Clifford D. Simaks surviving Western stories... and admittedly I skipped it. I had heard that it was a weak story and I just never got back to it.
Junkyard is a fun puzzle story. A group of surveyors wind up on an alien planet and discover the titular junkyard: an inexplicable pile of what they know to be starship parts, which would be proof of not only alien life but also that aliens had interstellar capabilities. However, despite all of their training and specialized knowledge, they have no idea how the alien engine works or even goes together. And then they realize that they have forgotten how their own engine works, and that something else is happening.
A pretty fun straightforward story, but nothing spectacular. Simak presents a pretty interesting mystery and has the protagonists begin to work out exactly what's going on through deductive reasoning and trial and error.
Mr. Meek - Musketeer is a comedy Space Western about the titular Mr. Meek, a middle-aged white-collar worker who's saved enough money to go out to the great frontier of space, looking for adventure and freedom after a relatively cozy and boring life. Mr. Meek proceeds to get himself in trouble through misunderstandings and a hidden well-spring of ability and a spine he didn't even know he had.
This story was pretty fun and felt like a bit of a light-hearted and loving jab at the kind of people who find wish fulfillment in the escapism of the Science Fiction magazines Simak was being published in. Mr. Meek felt like a Don Knotts type of character, and it was nice that rather than being a hindrance, Mr. Meek was genuinely capable, in unintended and surprising ways, rather than being solely the butt of the joke.
Neighbor is described pretty well by its introduction, a quintessential Simak story where aliens interact with a rural community.
I feel like this story works because of its first-person narrative, with the narrator being a small-town farmer talking about how his community learned to accept its newest tenants, a family of aliens (both literal and metaphorical) who move in. The narrator's gradual understanding of his new neighbors' nature, and acceptance of them as they improve the community gives the story a sense of psychological realism. The community only really accepts the aliens because, on top of being personable and quite helpful (providing rain and helping with ailments), they also protect the quietness of the community and refuse to let it be disrupted.
It wouldn't take much to change this story into a horror story. The aliens refuse to let a journalist leave town, literally bending space around the town to stop them from reaching the interstate, trapping him and his family until they decide to settle down in town, and later it's revealed that the alien family is stopping people like the government or journalists from finding the town at all to stop them from disrupting the peace.
At heart though this is an immigrant story, and to reiterate the above point, it does feel that the family is accepted mostly because of how they integrate into the culture of the town and don't disrupt the community. They aren't really given a culture of their own, adopting as much as possible the culture of the rural Midwest community. It's heartbreaking, in a way. But the fact that the community accepts them because they blend in so well feels psychologically real, and I feel that Simak may have been commenting on this as well, the inability of a rural community to accept otherness unless it conforms and/or proves helpful.
Shadow World is another puzzle story, similar to the above <i>Junkyard</i>. Planet surveyors are working on a planet that seems to be inhabited by strange beings they've taken to calling Shadows. These beings follow them around, possibly sabotage their machinery, and don't seem to eat or drink.
This story is also a pretty straightforward one. The protagonist is presented with a series of mysteries and spends most of the story breaking them down and solving them.
So Bright the Vision is a story that seems in some ways weirdly prescient despite really being a commentary of something completely unrelated. The story takes place in a far future where humanity has based all of its economic output on writing stories for sale to alien cultures, with all writing being done by computers. Every writer has one and provides it with tape reels of characters, plots, backstories, stylings, etc. until they get the end result. The higher quality machines produce higher quality stories, while most people have to make do with lower quality 'Yarners' as they're called.
Obviously, in 2023, this feels prescient of the kind of future that Silicon Valley AI peddlers are trying to sell to us. All creative endeavors can be done by computer for cheap, so why pay people for creativity? Of course this story was written in 1956, and what Simak was commenting on was the publishing industry, the science fiction magazines in particular, and the all-pervasive need for writers to conform to strict narrative styles and types, based on what publishers thought was most likely to sell. An issue that, of course, has not gone away.
If anything, the story is really prescient of how we have turned stories and creative endeavors into 'content', with the amount of information we can gather from audiences and the all-pervasive algorithms allow companies to set up an even narrower set of hyper-focus-tested stories and art.
I feel that the beginning of this story works well. The protagonist is dirt broke with almost no opportunities to make any money, his yarner is almost derelict, the publishers are offering him worse and worse pay and rejecting what he can turn in. The narrative seems to be building towards a story about the life of a working writer.
However, I feel that the story kind of falls apart about halfway through. It falls into the trap that I think a lot of writers do when they start to discuss the importance of stories and fiction. It's not that they're wrong, but it begins to feel a bit self-important. It's almost impossible to discuss the importance of fiction within fiction without it feeling a bit like the writer is patting themselves on the back. The story maintains the tightrope walk for the first chunk of the story, and there is a cynicism to its take on fiction with the idea that humans are the only people who write because we're the only species to lie, but overall I feel that the story loses me past a certain point.
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Overall I don't feel that this collection really grabs me as much as the first one did. There's nothing that really reaches the quality of Ogre, I Am Crying All Inside, The Call from Beyond, or All the Traps of Earth from the previous collection.
However, that's not to say that this collection is bad. Simak is a quality writer, and his prose is direct, clean, and easy to read, and I found the whole book entertaining, the one Western story being an exception.
5 or 6 out of 10
-
Spoilers below:
The Big Front Yard is an award-winning novelette, having won a Hugo in 1959, and is included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two. It's about a small-town antiquities seller and tinkerer who ends up making first contact with alien life, bringing humanity into a galactic system of ideas trading.
There's a bit going on here, mainly between the working class, rural protagonist and how he interacts with the rapidly industrializing world around him. The protagonist is part of a family that's been in the area for generations, but he owns only the family home and makes very little. He laments that at some point the forests and wilderness around him will be cut down, and there's not much that can be done to stop it. Despite his skills as a salesman and tinkerer, he makes little as opposed to a neighbor of his, a businessman who runs a computer plant and who admits that he can't do much but can pay people who can and that's why he's so wealthy.
To avoid reiterating the whole plot here, the narrative provides the protagonist with sole ownership of access to an alien world, one where he can use his full skills as a trader and barterer to begin trading solely in ideas, rather than wealth or resources he lacks, with the aliens he finds there.
I like the concepts behind the story, especially the idea that a working-class person can become the most important person in this situation due to actual skills rather than wealth or connections and that interactions with aliens could be based on something greater than capital. However, the story itself didn't really grab me, unfortunately.
The Observer is a rather short narrative, following a being slowly becoming aware of itself and its own memories.
The experimental nature of this story's structure was interesting, having a gradual expansion of concept and vocabulary as the titular observer began to understand more and more of itself and its surroundings, and the plot reasons for that. It reminded me of Simak's later I Had No Head and My Eyes Were Floating Way Up in the Air from the previous collection, which was originally written for Harlan Ellison's unfinished The Last Dangerous Visions anthology, which I feel took the idea and developed it a bit more.
Trail City's Hot-Lead Crusaders is one of Clifford D. Simaks surviving Western stories... and admittedly I skipped it. I had heard that it was a weak story and I just never got back to it.
Junkyard is a fun puzzle story. A group of surveyors wind up on an alien planet and discover the titular junkyard: an inexplicable pile of what they know to be starship parts, which would be proof of not only alien life but also that aliens had interstellar capabilities. However, despite all of their training and specialized knowledge, they have no idea how the alien engine works or even goes together. And then they realize that they have forgotten how their own engine works, and that something else is happening.
A pretty fun straightforward story, but nothing spectacular. Simak presents a pretty interesting mystery and has the protagonists begin to work out exactly what's going on through deductive reasoning and trial and error.
Mr. Meek - Musketeer is a comedy Space Western about the titular Mr. Meek, a middle-aged white-collar worker who's saved enough money to go out to the great frontier of space, looking for adventure and freedom after a relatively cozy and boring life. Mr. Meek proceeds to get himself in trouble through misunderstandings and a hidden well-spring of ability and a spine he didn't even know he had.
This story was pretty fun and felt like a bit of a light-hearted and loving jab at the kind of people who find wish fulfillment in the escapism of the Science Fiction magazines Simak was being published in. Mr. Meek felt like a Don Knotts type of character, and it was nice that rather than being a hindrance, Mr. Meek was genuinely capable, in unintended and surprising ways, rather than being solely the butt of the joke.
Neighbor is described pretty well by its introduction, a quintessential Simak story where aliens interact with a rural community.
I feel like this story works because of its first-person narrative, with the narrator being a small-town farmer talking about how his community learned to accept its newest tenants, a family of aliens (both literal and metaphorical) who move in. The narrator's gradual understanding of his new neighbors' nature, and acceptance of them as they improve the community gives the story a sense of psychological realism. The community only really accepts the aliens because, on top of being personable and quite helpful (providing rain and helping with ailments), they also protect the quietness of the community and refuse to let it be disrupted.
It wouldn't take much to change this story into a horror story. The aliens refuse to let a journalist leave town, literally bending space around the town to stop them from reaching the interstate, trapping him and his family until they decide to settle down in town, and later it's revealed that the alien family is stopping people like the government or journalists from finding the town at all to stop them from disrupting the peace.
At heart though this is an immigrant story, and to reiterate the above point, it does feel that the family is accepted mostly because of how they integrate into the culture of the town and don't disrupt the community. They aren't really given a culture of their own, adopting as much as possible the culture of the rural Midwest community. It's heartbreaking, in a way. But the fact that the community accepts them because they blend in so well feels psychologically real, and I feel that Simak may have been commenting on this as well, the inability of a rural community to accept otherness unless it conforms and/or proves helpful.
Shadow World is another puzzle story, similar to the above <i>Junkyard</i>. Planet surveyors are working on a planet that seems to be inhabited by strange beings they've taken to calling Shadows. These beings follow them around, possibly sabotage their machinery, and don't seem to eat or drink.
This story is also a pretty straightforward one. The protagonist is presented with a series of mysteries and spends most of the story breaking them down and solving them.
So Bright the Vision is a story that seems in some ways weirdly prescient despite really being a commentary of something completely unrelated. The story takes place in a far future where humanity has based all of its economic output on writing stories for sale to alien cultures, with all writing being done by computers. Every writer has one and provides it with tape reels of characters, plots, backstories, stylings, etc. until they get the end result. The higher quality machines produce higher quality stories, while most people have to make do with lower quality 'Yarners' as they're called.
Obviously, in 2023, this feels prescient of the kind of future that Silicon Valley AI peddlers are trying to sell to us. All creative endeavors can be done by computer for cheap, so why pay people for creativity? Of course this story was written in 1956, and what Simak was commenting on was the publishing industry, the science fiction magazines in particular, and the all-pervasive need for writers to conform to strict narrative styles and types, based on what publishers thought was most likely to sell. An issue that, of course, has not gone away.
If anything, the story is really prescient of how we have turned stories and creative endeavors into 'content', with the amount of information we can gather from audiences and the all-pervasive algorithms allow companies to set up an even narrower set of hyper-focus-tested stories and art.
I feel that the beginning of this story works well. The protagonist is dirt broke with almost no opportunities to make any money, his yarner is almost derelict, the publishers are offering him worse and worse pay and rejecting what he can turn in. The narrative seems to be building towards a story about the life of a working writer.
However, I feel that the story kind of falls apart about halfway through. It falls into the trap that I think a lot of writers do when they start to discuss the importance of stories and fiction. It's not that they're wrong, but it begins to feel a bit self-important. It's almost impossible to discuss the importance of fiction within fiction without it feeling a bit like the writer is patting themselves on the back. The story maintains the tightrope walk for the first chunk of the story, and there is a cynicism to its take on fiction with the idea that humans are the only people who write because we're the only species to lie, but overall I feel that the story loses me past a certain point.
-
Overall I don't feel that this collection really grabs me as much as the first one did. There's nothing that really reaches the quality of Ogre, I Am Crying All Inside, The Call from Beyond, or All the Traps of Earth from the previous collection.
However, that's not to say that this collection is bad. Simak is a quality writer, and his prose is direct, clean, and easy to read, and I found the whole book entertaining, the one Western story being an exception.
5 or 6 out of 10
ipb1's review against another edition
3.0
Ah - the golden age of SF - the 1950s western (misogyny, xenophobia, alcohol, and baccy) transposed into space (...or not in one case in this anthology). Guiltily enjoyable C-movie stuff.
metaphorosis's review against another edition
4.0
Metaphorosis Reviews
4 stars
The Big Front Yard is a strong but somewhat mixed bag - mostly strong stories, some that don't feel completely thought out, and one that just doesn't work. The one fairly experimental story is the one that doesn't work, but when Simak sticks closer to familiar ground, he does very well indeed - stories about ordinary people who deal with extraordinary things without breaking a sweat.
The best stories include:
A strong collection with just a few weak points.
4 stars
The Big Front Yard is a strong but somewhat mixed bag - mostly strong stories, some that don't feel completely thought out, and one that just doesn't work. The one fairly experimental story is the one that doesn't work, but when Simak sticks closer to familiar ground, he does very well indeed - stories about ordinary people who deal with extraordinary things without breaking a sweat.
The best stories include:
- The Big Front Yard - A small-town handyman receives unusual and generous visitors. Classic Simak - small-town doesn't mean foolish or naive.
- Junkyard - A human ship breaks down on a strange planet, and finds signs it's not the first to do so. The focus wanders a bit, but the overall theme is strong.
Mr. Meek - Musketeer - A mild-mannered accountant finds an unexpected talent for adventure. The genius of Simak is that he doesn't transform to macho hero at the end.- Neighbor - An odd neighbor moves into a small-town. Nothing startling, but a nice encapsulation of what Simak did so well.
- So Bright the Vision - A writer struggles to get by in a time when most creation is automated. The understanding, supportive woman could stand to be updated, but the concept is nice, and it's one of Simak's relatively few stories with pointed social commentary.
A strong collection with just a few weak points.
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