I'm not in the market for ebooks but I still want to say that there must be others who are and are like me in thinking it's great that you're reprinting those, especially together (since "Tycho" is just a novella). Cosmic Engineers, especially, isn't exactly typical Simak and I don't know that it doesn't hit some like Empire, but I thought it was a blast. And "Tycho" has suffered in undeserved obscurity due to its length and history. Good work and I hope they do well!
I agree with you that COSMIC ENGINEERS is not exactly "typical" Simak; in fact, I'm sure Cliff would agree with you, also -- albeit not in those exact terms.
It was not Cliff's idea to write that book, at all. He had never written a novel, and had been writing fiction for less than ten years (we can't be sure of an exact time when he started writing fiction) -- and that only in short form.
Cliff himself would later say that in those early years he was struggling to learn how to write (fiction, I mean...). He said that in those early years it was easy to be a science fiction writer -- because it was a new thing; nobody really knew how to write sf but the people who attempted it thought it was all wonderful. Cliff later said most of it was terrible, but the writers did not know that.
Cliff had started selling sf in the early 30's, but after a few years of selling to the existing magazines, he seemed to pull away from the field. In later years self-professed "critics" of the field came up with several reasons for that...most of which don't match history.
I've talked of part of this in a couple of the introductions I wrote to some of the Simak Collections I've put together; but basically, I believe that he stopped trying to sell sf because he had become disillusioned with the field. The stories were bad, the editors were bad, and the money was bad.
He did not in fact cease writing fiction; rather, he tried other fields, including mysteries, adventure stories, etc. But he did not do well there. And while he never, to my knowledge, said so, I suspect that he bumped his nose up against the "rules" of good writing that were in effect in those other fields; that is, they were fields that had been around for much longer than science fiction --- long enough that there were more experienced authors there, and editors that knew more about writing -- and magazines that had more money to pay authors.
I don't know how Cliff came to know John W. Campbell, Jr. But I know that at a time when a number of the SF magazines had gone out of business and most of the others were struggling to keep afloat, Cliff went elsewhere; until about 1937, when Campbell, although still quite young, was made editor of ASTOUNDING. Cliff said later that at the time he excitedly told his wife that John would change it all. Cliff began to write sf stories again, and he sent them to John ("Rule 18" would be the first); and Cliff became a regular of that magazine and popular with the readers.
So John asked Cliff, in 1939, to write a novel that could be serialized in the magazine. Cliff was reluctant, but he felt he owed some sort of duty to John. And Cliff thought he might be able to do some of the things that had been lacking in the sf field.
Cliff did in fact do it differently than most serialized sf of the time -- but in later years he came to recognize that he still had not learned enough about writing, and that he had failed at what he wanted to do -- including, he said, writing a story about real people, about regular folks. Most sf stories, he would say, were either hamfisted expositions of cardboard plots and characters created to lay out pseudo-scientific theories, or they featured heroic superscientists.
At a later time, in a truly telling remark, Cliff would say of COSMIC ENGINEERS that "sometimes you just had to be grandiose."
COSMIC ENGINEERS did in fact contain new thoughts, new attitudes -- for instance, it revolved around a female superscientist who had spent centuries in suspended animation after she rebelled against the rules of the society of her time. And a sharp reader will find other elements that would later appear in subsequent -- and better written -- Simak stories.
Cliff would not actually return to writing novel-length sf until the 50's (and for purposes of this essay, I'm not counting CITY as a "novel"). But he came to feel that he had found his way as a writer in the mid-40's, with the stories that would ultimately be collected in CITY.
He made himself into a 'whole different kind of writer, yes. But the seeds of that writer were planted much earlier, and I find it fascinating -- now that I've read so much of Cliff's work -- to see how a few words in earlier stories reverberate in later ones...
