The Ghost of a Model T: And Other Stories

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Tales of nostalgia and loss in a world overrun by technology

Hank is walking home from the bar when the Model T pulls alongside him. Its been decades since he saw a car this old, and the sound of it takes him right back to his twenties. The door is open, and when he climbs in, the car takes offwithout a driver. Before he knows whats happened, Hank is right back at Big Spring Pavilion, where he spent his youth drinking bootleg whiskey and chasing pretty girls. He will find the past is not quite as he remembered it, but still a lovely place to go for a drive.

This collection includes some of the finest short fiction Clifford Simak ever wrote, including City, the story that became the basis for his beloved novel of the same name. In the history of science fiction, no author has ever better understood that the Great Plains and the cosmos are closer together than we think.

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.