The Big Front Yard - (Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak) by Clifford D Simak (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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

Hiram Taine is a handyman who can fix anything. When he isn't 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 basement--a ceiling that appears to have the ability to repair television sets so they're better than before--he 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.

Review Quotes

"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 SF's 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 [Simak's] stories with particular attention, and I couldn't help but notice the simplicity and directness of the writing--the 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

About the Author

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 the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, writing fiction in his spare time.

Simak was best known for the book City, a reaction to the horrors of World War II, and for his novel Way Station. In 1953 City was 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 Association's Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.