Ring Around the Sun By Clifford Simak

Ring Around the Sun
By Clifford Simak
Copyright 1953

It is always fun to read old science fiction set in the future and ascertain what they got right and what they got wrong in the way of prediction. A lot of it is dated, but I find that the writers of the pulp era like Clifford Simak tell stories about characters rather than technology and whatever they got wrong about the future is more than offset by a rich story with great characters. Such was my experience with Ring Around the Sun.

The world’s economy is being destabilized by products that never wear out. Cars never break down or die. Razor blades never go dull. Homes are prefabricated and sold at a price that is extremely low. Most importantly, food is synthesized and given to the poor for free.

The source of these manufactures cannot be located. The company that produces them cannot be located. The world’s leading industrialists panic.

They hire a man, a writer of boys’ adventures, to locate the factory and corporation. Meanwhile, with society starting to fall apart, they organize violent dissent against the products manufacturers whom they are able to identify as mutant humans.

Jay Vickers knows there’s something different about himself. He recalls a time when, as a child, he was able to travel to a fantasy land with the aid of an old fashioned spinning top. He also recalls entering that world unaided with the girl he loved as a young man.

He returns to the rural area where he was raised and finds all of the farms deserted. He locates the top. He then locates the old house where his girlfriend lived and finds it deserted. He heads back to New York to his contact, Crawford, to complete his mission.

On the way, he stops in a small town to eat and the townspeople discover that he is driving one of the new cars. A riot ensues and the car is destroyed. He retrieves the top from the car and hides. He decides his only escape is to the fantasy world. He spins the top and lands in a pastoral land, seemingly untouched by human hand.

He decides to head back from whence he came. He walks for many days before coming across a large factory operated by robots. He can’t determine what it is they are making, but the factory is complex.

He makes his way past the factory unmolested and finds his old girlfriend’s house still standing. He knocks on the door and is greeted by a robot who invites him in. While there, he overhears a conversation between the robot and an old friend he thought was dead. In that conversation, he learns that he is an android.

He flees from the house back out into the wilderness where he meets a man out hunting. He learns that that man came from his world. He fell into poverty when he lost his factory job and had to accept the synthesized food from the mutants. The mutants offered him the opportunity to move onto another earth, untouched by the miseries of the current world. He jumped at the opportunity and never looked back.

Vickers spends a few days with the man and is invited to join the small community of farmers, build a home, and live out his days there. Troubled by the information that he is not really human, he decides to head back to the “big house” as the locals call it and get some answers.

He gets there and is welcomed. His old friend greets him and explains the nature of the cosmos to him and how there are other earths in the universe, one behind another in a ring around the sun. Some men and women have evolved and developed this knowledge and are trying to save the human race by relocating them to these other earths. To motivate them, they are making life on the current earth as miserable as possible.

Vickers is also told that he was once human and his body still exists in storage. His soul was divided and placed in three vessels. One of those vessels was his friend, Eb, to whom he was talking. Eb won’t tell him who the third was.
Vickers is instructed to return to his own earth and hasten the process of moving people along. He is to hook up with a group of people who preach and practice returning to re-industrial times to tell them that their dreams can be reality.

Before Vickers leaves, he does some historical research on his old girlfriend and finds she doesn’t exist. The memory was planted to guide him to the house. With his old flame out of his mind, he discovers that he is in love with his agent, Ann, who he now knows to be a mutant. But he is afraid that she might be the third part of him which would doom the romance.

He gets back to New York and finds Ann and professes his love for her. He locates the group preaching a return to simpler times and informs them of his secret. He then decides to confront Crawford. He enters Crawford’s building to find him in a board meeting. Equipped with a film he has made, he shows the board the secret of the ring around the sun. One by one, they start to disappear. They are mutants as well.

Crawford wants to kill Vickers but can’t and doesn’t understand why. Then it dawns on Vickers that it is not Ann who is the third part of his soul. It is Crawford. He leaves Crawford to find Ann and the two go off to live in a more pastoral, simpler earth.

Simak writes very much like Ray Bradbury. His characters are not superheroes who save universes. They are everymen caught up in extraordinary circumstances. This is why I enjoy the works of Bradbury and Simak more than the modern writers who rely on technology and superheroes to drive their stories.

Much of the 1950s culture can be found in this book. Economic displacement was a hard reality of early 1950s with runaway inflation brought about by the end of World War II and the Korean War. We also see signs of the fear of communism and subversive plots by other countries to undermine our economy and way of life.

The book has a well paced plot until he stops to talk to his friend. There, we must plod through page after page of philosophical babble about the nature of the cosmos before the story gets moving again. It’s as if Simak had to pause to explain what his novel was about rather than revealing it through the plot.

Simak didn’t get much wrong technologically in the book. It is set in 1978 and the year really isn’t that important. The only glaring dated incident is when he had to wait for long distance operators to complete a call. Direct dial long distance was available in 1978.

The long narrative pause is the book’s only glaring weakness. Vickers is a likeable character who makes rational decisions based on the information he is given. This was a pulp novel, published in installments in Galaxy Science Fiction. This type of story telling doesn’t lend itself to complex character development and Vickers is the only character with any development. But he remains that simple man without agenda, just trying to do the right thing.

The plot twist at the end was brilliant. I was convinced the novel was going to end tragically with him and Ann unable to fall in love. I have to admit that I didn’t see the twist coming. That twist dramatically raised my opinion of the book and made reading it worthwhile

The Worlds of Clifford Simak by Clifford Simak

The Worlds of Clifford Simak
By Clifford Simak
Copyright 1960

Dusty Zebra
Ever wonder what happens to your minor possessions that seem to mysteriously disappear never to be seen again? One man finds out that there exists another dimension where an alien race likes to acquire objects from our dimension, and they are always willing to trade. The man discovers a place on his desk that serves as a vortex into this other dimension of bartering aliens. He sends through various trinkets and office supplies and receives various, usually unidentifiable devices. But finally, he receives the one item no housewife will want to be without and makes millions by trading for hundreds of thousands of them. Newton’s Second Law takes effect because there has to be an equal and opposite reaction – even between dimensions.

This was a light, fun story. For its simplicity, it was overlong.

Honorable Opponent
An uneasy spaceship captain cools his heels on a barren planet, waiting to make a prisoner exchange. His side lost the war and lost it badly because their implacable enemy could make their ships disappear at will. When the enemy captain arrives to exchange the prisoners, the captain learns that alien races have alien perspectives on the reasons to wage war.

Simak, in the telling of this story, demonstrates that it must be accepted in science fiction writing that an alien culture would have values and ideas far different than our own. It’s a common theme in Golden Age science fiction done so well by Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Theodore Sturgeon.

Carbon Copy
A small time real estate agent lands the deal of a lifetime when a developer offers him a 90 percent commission on leasing houses inside a new, self contained development complete with shopping centers and banks. The deal gets sweeter when the agent finds out that no matter how many families he leases homes to, there are always plenty of vacancies. The development always appears to be empty even though tenants regularly call him and visit him. He investigates to find out where these people went.

This is an original take on multi-dimension. Multi-dimension is as common in science fiction as rockets and flying saucers and remains a popular device today. Witness the television series, Lost. It’s easy to do it badly and having been done so many times, it’s difficult to find a new twist on it. Simak does.

Founding Father
A group of immortal humans flies through space for 100 years, enjoying each other’s company and passing the time in leisure and comfort. When they arrive at their destination planet, one man finds out he was alone on the ship. His fellow travelers were false beings conjured up by the Dimensino. His job is to see to his cargo – 1000 human embryos to be nurtured in incubators to start a new colony of man. But the Dimensino has an allure that he must defeat if he is to carry out his mission.

Simak’s prose are so crisp and spare in this story. It moves quickly and does not wander off into needless explanation. The Dimensino is. That’s all we know about it. That ambiguity makes it an enjoyable page turner.

Idiot’s Crusade
A young man with limited intelligence inexplicably finds himself endowed with powers that make him nearly omnipotent. He can change people’s actions, emotions, and motives with just mere thoughts. He can also make the do things. After “improving” the people of his village, he looks to expand his horizons.

The Big Front Yard
A fix-it man and antique dealer gets a heck of a surprise when some old, derelict computers are delivered to his home for him to look at. While his back door leads directly to his back yard, his front door opens into another world. The people who inhabit the world at his back door take notice immediately and his home becomes the center of worldwide attention. Meanwhile all the antique dealer wants to do is find his dog that has gone wandering off into that other world.

This was just a bit overlong to me. The story was traditional sci-fi that deals in dimensional doors. Simak does write the parts of animals well as he demonstrates here and in the story that follows.

Operation Stinky
An old man lives near an Air Force base in a shack. Under that shack are several skunks that the man has learned to co-exist with. One day, his dogs corner a skunk that seems to be special. He is friendly, purrs like a cat, and clings to the man like a pet. When that skunk makes modifications to the old man’s jalopy that give it some impressive abilities, the Air Force takes notice.

Thankfully, Simak did not engage in overtelling this story because it would have been easy to do with so much in play. He gives us enough action with the car to create the conflict. He develops the relationship between the man and his skunk just enough to know they share a bond, and the military people are not caricatures as they always seem to be in Golden Age sci-fi.

Jackpot
On a remote, arid plant, a salvage vessel crew finds the ultimate library containing answers to the mysteries of the cosmos. The crew is confident they are going to cash in on all of these great secrets. But the crew’s doctor has serious reservations about the morality of peddling in knowledge and throws a wrench into the works.

This morality conflict between captain and crew reminded me of the conflict between Spender and his captain in Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles story, Third Expedition.

Death Scene
As decades of war pummel the planet, men are suddenly given the ability to see 24 hours into the future. It gives each man the power to foresee the actions of others. War is rendered obsolete and there is peace in the world. But the ability forces other pastimes into obsolescence as well – activities such as sports, gambling, reading, etc. It’s against this backdrop that a man foresees his own death to come the following day. His family sees also and, as is custom in this world of perfectly prescient beings, they prepare to gather for an evening of reminiscing before the next day dawns.

Simak accomplishes here that feat of telling a great deal of story with just a few words. Those are the short stories that are best and kudos to Simak for this clever tale of culture shock and its fundamental and unforeseen effects on the lives of people.

Green Thumb
A county agricultural agent discovers he has an alien, and intelligent plant living on his property. He is able to gain the trust and eventually friendship of the plant – although their ability to communicate is nearly nonexistent. The agent knows that the plant abhors our world where vegetation is grown and harvested for the purposes of building, healing, eating, and recreation.

In a genre where alien races can oddly speak English, Simak successfully reminds us that any alien contact is probably going to be completely alien.

Lulu
A spaceship’s resident robot falls in love with every male member of the crew. When they reject her romantic overtures, she sets the ship down on a remote planet and shuts down. When she finds one of her own kind to fall in love with, her motives change. The men have to find a way to stay safe of her paramour and convince her to leave the planet.

Neighbor
A new neighbor takes over a run down farm in Coon Valley, Nebraska. His neighbors take note of how quickly he is able to make repairs to the home and the farm equipment. They notice that his farm implements need no manpower to make them run. They also notice that it always rains on his farm when he needs rain, despite what weather they may be having in the rest of the valley. The new neighbor is perfectly willing to share his abilities to benefit all, but a snooping reporter threatens to ruin it all.

This is the kind of science fiction that would influence later sci-fi screenwriters like Rod Serling. This nifty tale has Twilight Zone written all over it.