The Big Front Yard: And Other Stories

(Paperback)

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Description

Tales of the unknown in which a fix-it man crosses into another dimensionand more

Hiram Taine is a handyman who can fix anything. When he isnt fiddling with his tools, he is roaming through the woods with his dog, Towser, as he has done for as long as he can remember. He likes things that he can understand. But when a new ceiling appears in his basementa ceiling that appears to have the ability to repair television sets so theyre better than beforehe knows he has come up against a mystery that no man can solve.

Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novelette, The Big Front Yard is a powerful story about what happens when an ordinary man finds reality coming apart around him. Along with the other stories in this collection, it is some of the most lyrical science fiction ever published.

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

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 SFs 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 [Simaks] stories with particular attention, and I couldnt help but notice the simplicity and directness of the writingthe 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

Author Bio

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 theMinneapolis Star-Tribune,writing fiction in his spare time.

Simak was best known for the bookCity,a reaction to the horrors of World War II, and for his novelWay Station.In 1953Citywas 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 Associations Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.