Clifford D. Simak: "All the Traps of Earth," "Good Night, Mr. James," and "Drop Dead"

I've had my differences with Clifford D. Simak over the years.  I can't get on board with many of his attitudes--that the country life is better than city life, that primitive people are better than advanced people, that robots and dogs and ants are better than humans, for example.  But I think Simak is a capable writer, and have enjoyed much of his work, so, when I saw at an antiques mall in Hagerstown, MD a 1963 Macfadden edition of All the Traps of Earth and Other Stories with a fun Richard Powers cover, I paid the 75¢ asked.  There are six stories in this book (apparently the 1962 hardcover edition had nine); let's read the first three today.

"All the Traps of Earth" (1960)

"All the Traps of Earth" first appeared in F&SF alongside tales by Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon and Avram Davidson in an "All Star Issue."  It would go on to appear in many Simak collections, including some "Best of" volumes.

This is a story about a robot who has emotions and desires, just like a human.  He feels lonely, he fears death, he thinks he has a soul, he experiences pride and anxiety, guilt and regret.  he even makes boneheaded mistakes and has to practice to master repetitive physical tasks.  This robot is mothing like a machine at all!  All through the long story (35 pages of text here in this paperback) we are privy to his thoughts and his thoughts are exactly like an ordinary person's--Simak makes no effort to portray a mind any different from a human mind, he doesn't explore how a robot's psychology might be different that of a human.  These sorts of stories are a tough sell to me, because I can't get over the idea that a robot is just a tool like a typewriter or a screwdriver, and so simply can't have any emotions or will.  

The robot Richard Daniel has served the Barrington family for six hundred years.  The Barringtons were a powerful and important family, among them pioneering astronauts and elected officials and all that, and Richard Daniel rarely left the house, so the robot has been able to avoid having his memory erased every hundred years as is required by law.  This law, we are told, is the result of human envy--it would hurt people's feelings to have to deal with robots who have "lived" longer than any human could.  This is Simak's misanthropy revealing itself in a silly way--in real life people don't envy the longevity of centuries-old houses and paintings and sculptures and seek to destroy them, and the same goes for centuries-old trees or 150-year-old tortoises; with the exception of violent radicals driven by their own psychological problems, people in real life are indifferent to old stuff or actually revere old houses and paintings and sculptures and plants and animals and seek to protect and preserve them.

Anyway, the last of the Barringtons has died and the family estate is going to be sold at auction, including Richard Daniel, whose new owner will be legally obligated to erase his memories.  he doesn't want to "die," so Richard Daniel puts on a disguise and runs away through the suburbs which, even though it is the 25th century or something, are just like a 1950s suburb.  In one of the story's clever bits he stows away on a starship by clinging to its exterior and rides through normal space out there in the vacuum.  When the ship exceeds the speed of light and goes into hyperspace we get some psychedelic passages as Richard Daniel's mind is shattered and he communes with the universe.  When the ship return to normal space Richard Daniel forgets all he learned about the universe while in hyperspace and wants to weep.  

The ship lands on a planet where there are no humans, only robots.  These robots also act just like humans, expressing fear, committing crimes and being tried in court and punished, selling and buying services with money, etc.  The point of the story isn't that Richard Daniel is a special robot because he has developed a personality--all robots have personalities in Simak's universe.  What makes Richard Daniel special is that his time in hyperspace, outside the protection of the ship's hull, has given him psychic powers, which he discovers while on the robot planet.

Richard Daniel stows aboard a tramp space ship crewed by thuggish jerks who are most unlike the kindly upper-middle class Barringtons and, able to read the sordid minds of these people with his new abilities, begins to develop a superiority complex, thinking himself the best of robots and robots better than humans.  As the tramp starship travels from planet to planet, Richard Daniel learns how to use his powers to sense problems with the ship, loose wires and leaky valves and that sort of thing, and to fix these problems telekinetically.  Then he realizes he can detect and cure the ailments of humans in the same way.

The tramp stops at a planet on the outer edge of the human space civilization, one which is rarely visited, where people live in a little village and haul goods on horse-drawn wagons.  Richard Daniel, who has been thinking of becoming a messiah to the robots and leading their liberation, finds that the people here are nice, and decides to jump ship and help these simple folk, to mold their civilization into something great--he feels they need him, and he realizes that he needs to be needed and it is his duty and destiny to help improve humanity with his newfound special powers.

"All the Traps of Earth," with its romanticizing of primitive rural life and its religious robots and its sentimentality and misanthropy, is characteristic of Simak's work, while its elitist sense-of-wonder ending ("...on this Earth-like planet, through the generations, a new Earth would arise....perhaps, given only time, he could transfer to the people of the planet all the powers and understanding he would find inside himself") is characteristic of classic Golden-Age SF.  As I have been pointing out, I don't accept many of its basic assumptions.  However, it is well-written--the pacing and descriptions and all that are good, and Richard Daniel is a sympathetic and believable character.  If I put aside the basic absurdity of emotional, willful, creative robots, I can't deny that "All the Traps of Earth" is a pretty good story that skillfully achieves Simak's goals and that I enjoyed it.  So, thumbs up for this one.

"Good Night, Mr. James" (1951)

This is a great SF thriller with multiple twists.  "Good Night, Mr. James" is another story about nonhumans stuck in a human society and how they deal with its rules, but Simak here does the thing I was complaining he failed to do in "All the Traps of Earth"--he gets into the heads of nonhuman beings.  Also, while "All the Traps of Earth" is a sort of optimistic story with a happy ending, "Good Night, Mr. James" is a horror story in which everybody is fighting for his life and survival is unlikely.

Henderson James wakes up in a suburban neighborhood with a pistol, and takes some time to remember who he is and what he is doing.  As his mind unclouds, he remembers he is a biologist who studies aliens, and had illegally brought to Earth a monster that reproduces at a rapid rate and is fanatically dedicated to exterminating all competing life forms.  If this monster were to escape from captivity, it could multiply so fast that it might take over the Earth, or at least kill thousands or millions of people in the attempt.  Horror of horrors, James remembers that he did let the monster get away and now he is hunting it down--he only has a few hours to kill it before it reproduces and puts all of our lives in jeopardy!  (Thank heaven in real life scientists never experiment on deadly organisms and then negligently let them escape to threaten all of our lives!)

James tracks down the monster and blasts it--as it dies the alien sends him a telepathic message which provides a clue that blows James's mind!  James is not the original James, but a duplicate James!  In cases of dire emergency, "James" now recalls, the government allows the temporary creation of duplicate people to accomplish difficult tasks.  Two Jameses were needed to kill the wily alien monster because, with its telepathic powers, a lone man, even the world expert on the monster, could never sneak up on it.  Duplicate James was only able to kill the monster because its psychic abilities were focused on the original James.  Anyway, now that the monster is dead the duplicate James will be destroyed.  Duplicate James has to decide if he will quietly go to his death, or fight to prolong his life; dupe James takes the latter course so we get more tension and excitement and a real twist ending.

Quite good; Simak's concepts and plotting are compelling and his descriptions and inner monologues are all well done.  "Good Night, Mr. James" debuted in Galaxy and almost at once appeared in August Derleth's anthology The Outer Reaches: Favorite Science-Fiction Tales Chosen By Their Authors.  Since then it has been reprinted quite a few times.  Check it out!  

I believe The Time of Infinity is an abridged version of The Outer Reaches

"Drop Dead" (1956)

The human race is spreading throughout the galaxy!  The spearheads of this expansion are the hundreds of survey teams that explore one planet after another.  Our narrator is the captain of one such team; he is an agricultural economist and the other team members include a biologist, a botanist, a bacteriologist, etc., and their team's goal is to find new plant and animal life of practical value, things that can be profitably cultivated on already settled planets.  As the story begins the team has just landed on a planet where they encounter a herd of strange animals with hides that look like multi-colored checkboards; from some of the squares grow plants, others mark the location of insect hives.

From the moment they land this planet's ecosystem seems not to have evolved naturally but to have been planned and constructed for efficiency and uniformity.  There is only one type of grass, there are no insects, there is only one type of bacteria, and the only animal, those checkboard herbivores, seem too good to be true, to be exactly the type of agricultural asset they have been searching the galaxy for.  The scientists carefully study the beasts, and when an accident leads to the destruction of the ship's food supply, they eat the meat of the native animal and find it to be delicious, nutritious, even medicinal.  The captain doesn't eat the native meat, however, as he has a medical condition and is on a strict diet consisting of some goop that he keeps in his cabin and that survived the accident. 

But then a terrible effect of the native bacteria makes itself known!  The scientists are all doomed to suffer a horrible transformation and death.  Because he didn't eat the native meat, the captain will be the last to die, and he could try to get back to civilization to warn the human race of this trap planet.  But instead he decides to die with his friends.

I found "Drop Dead" to be long and tedious.  There is no physical or psychological danger until like the last two or three of the story's 25 pages, and very little human feeling, so I was never entertained and actually had trouble paying attention.  The scientific ideas of the story are as boring as the plot: ecosystems in SF are generally more exciting than the real ecosystem of Earth, with multiple intelligent species and dangerous monsters and so forth, but the ecosystem of the planet in the story is more simple than a real one and thus more boring.  The characters are lame; in "All the Traps of Earth" and "Good Night, Mr. James," Simak created characters with interesting and believable psychologies whose goals and actions grew logically out of their personalities, but the characters in "Drop Dead" are flat and simple, just cogs in the slowly grinding machine that is the story's mystery plot, a machine that regularly spits out clues and finally spits out the solution to the mystery--a mystery I didn't care about so the solution was inevitably going to be underwhelming.

        

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.  "Drop Dead" was first printed in Galaxy and later Robert Silverberg included it in 1971's The Science Fiction Bestiary.  According to isfdb "Drop Dead" will appear this year in a British anthology of ecological SF.  If "Drop Dead" is the British Library's idea of a "classic" then this anthology is going to be a snoozer, milord!

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Clifford Simak was voted the third Science Fiction Writers of America Grand master in 1977 (preceded by Robert Heinlein and Jack Williamson) and on the strength of "All the Traps of Earth" and "Good Night, Mr. James" I suspect he deserved the honor.  "Drop Dead" is a drag, but we all have off days.

Maybe we'll read the rest of my paperback copy of All the Traps of Earth and Other Stories in the future, but I sense we will be haunted by vampires in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.