The Visitors - by Clifford D Simak (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An enormous, mysterious box descends upon smalltown Minnesota, spelling trouble for the world, in this classic adventure from a Science Fiction Grand Master.

Forestry student Jerry Conklin is fly-fishing when something huge lands on his car, crushing it into the earth. It looks like a big black box--about fifty feet high and two hundred feet long--and the object stirs up quite a commotion among the townspeople of Lone Pine, Minnesota. One of them even shoots at it--and quickly pays for it with his life.

Around the country, people scramble to determine what exactly the box is. Is it a machine? Or maybe a sentient being? What does it want? They have no way of knowing.

Jerry, meanwhile, has firsthand knowledge after the visitor abducts him. Then, just as he discovers it is a living, intelligent creature, it releases him into the darkness of night.

As Jerry searches for a way back to civilization, more visitors descend upon Earth. They seem harmless enough. Then they begin eating trees, and that's only the beginning . . .

Praise for The Visitors

"One of the most engaging novels of alien invasion ever written." --Library Journal

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.