Who Represents SF?

My copy of Clifford Simak's City (SF Masterworks, Gollancz, London, 2010) has arrived and I am honestly uncertain as to whether I will summon up the motivation to reread it from cover to cover whereas, decades ago, I had rated it highly. I ordered City via eBay because recently on this blog I compared four stories set on Jupiter:

"Call Me Joe" by Poul Anderson

"Bridge" by James Blish

"Desertion" by Clifford Simak

"Skeleton Men of Jupiter" by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Of these stories, "Call Me Joe" is alone in not being part of a series - although three different Andersonian series do include Jupiter-related stories. "Bridge" was incorporated into Blish's They Shall Have Stars which I have recently reread with interest. "Desertion," which I was able to reread online, was incorporated into City, hence this purchase. 

The cover quotes Robert Heinlein as saying, "To read science fiction is to read Simak." What? I can think of several more significant names and would substitute Anderson for Simak. Heinlein himself - early Heinlein - is surely more important? Inside, Anthony Boucher, Isaac Asimov and James Gunn write highly of Simak. Asimov tried to imitate his style.

By contrast with this, James Blish, whom I rank with Anderson, did not respect Simak's works.

The Introduction by Gwyneth Jones quotes Heinlein:

"The reader who does not like Simak stories, does not like science fiction at all." (p. v)

Clearly untrue!

Jones informs us that Simak was:

"Never remotely interested in 'technology', or in factual 'science'..." (p. vii)

But science fiction is about the relationship of human beings not only to each other but also to the universe revealed by science including the potentialities of technology. Sf began with Frankenstein: can a scientist create life?

Simak himself is quoted as saying that, disillusioned by World War II and the Atomic Bomb, he wrote the City stories only to create a momentary refuge. When Jones expands on this, I find it difficult to paraphrase and therefore will have to quote at greater length than I would have preferred:

"For a moment, in these tales, a Man sits in his armchair, his loving Dog at his knee, a glass of whisky at his elbow; pondering the lives of small creatures in the quiet woods around his homestead. Asking nothing, demanding no reward or second chance for the failed experiment of human civilization; inventing nothing that isn't already held in this moment, he spins a dream of blameless wonderland." (ibid.)

Inventing nothing? That is not sf! Just before the passage quoted, Jones describes the City stories as having:

"...only the most perfunctory futuristic trappings." (ibid.)

That human civilization will fail, will even destroy itself, is one of the possibilities that has to be faced and is faced by sf writers, including Poul Anderson. Retreat to a homestead in the quiet woods in the present moment and not in any future endeavour is one possible response to this...

However, Jones goes further:

"Perhaps all of science fiction secretly lives in Simak's moment, and is made of the same stuff as City - a paradoxical hybrid of nihilism and wish-fulfilment; tempered by a stoic acceptance of the cold equations." (p. viii)

No, it does not. Acceptance yes but not either nihilism or wish-fulfilment. Poul Anderson takes us to the further reaches of space and time both in mythical worlds and in the physical universe insofar as it was understood at the time of writing.

Meanwhile here and now: for me, today has become very indulgent, staying in a dressing gown and adding to the blog instead of stirring out of the house. The next few days will have to involve a lot of physical exercise and much less computer time.