This post is brought to you by The Masterless Apprentice and The Masterless Assassin by T. Neil Thomas. The third volume, Masterless Apex is due out soon. These books follow the adventures of Tin the Necromancer who has been imprisoned in a glass bottle for three hundred years. He emerges into a world that has banned necromancy. It’s a good thing Tin is now seven plus feet tall with claws and horns for he’s going to need everything he can to deal with a world hostile to his magic. He has the help of Lenara and the other assassins of the guild, won over by Tin’s new ideas on management. This rolling romp is both Sword & Sorcery and fun.
Clifford D. Simak will always have his seat at the table of great Science Fiction writers, for City (1952) if nothing else. But there is another CDS that some fans might have missed, Simak the Fantasy writer. (There is also the even more obscure Simak, the Lovecaftian Horror writer. For that, go here.) His Fantasy novels, there are three, are housed slightly within an SF structure or feel: Enchanted Pilgrimage (1975), The Fellowship of the Tailsman (1978) and Where Evil Dwells (1982). The first is pre-Sword of Shannara and the second two post. This will be important later, not so much as an influence on Simak, but as it affected his marketing (and everybody else).
Enchanted Pilgrimage follows the scholar, Mark Cornwall, and the rafter goblin, Oliver, who spies him take a secret manuscript from a book in the Waylusing University library. The duo flee the Inquisitor Beckett in pursuit behind him. As they head north to the Wastelands, home of the faery creatures of the land, they pick up members of their small tribe. Gil, a furry Marshman, Hal, a Forestman, Coon, a giant raccoon, Snively the Gnome and Mary the innkeeper’s slave. They encounter violence, usually from Beckett’s goons, until they make it to the far lands where they meet deadly magical foes and finally unravel the truth about their world. It is a parallel world to our own. Only this final revelation, along with the character of Jones and his motorcycle, hit as Science Fiction lurking in the background. (Check out the good article on the book at Black Gate.)
From the foreword to Skirmish: The Great Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak (1975):
I remember an editor who, while he published the story, objected to one of my tales. “Cliff, the people in that story were losers,” he said. “I like losers,” I told him-and I do. (like them because they are much more interesting than winners. Like most people, I abhor the man who always wins; he makes the rest of us look so bad.
In my novel, The Enchanted Pilgrimage the only out-and-out book-length fantasy I have written, I found myself recoiling from following the usual practice of using an iron-thewed, invincible swordsman as a protagonist. So I made my protagonist a mild-mannered, rather ineffectual scholar.. To make up for it. I gave him a magic sword. Even so. he was fairly awkward in its handling. To me that ineffectual little scholar, having trouble getting his magic sword in and out of the scabbard. was much more believable and sympathetic. and thus easier to write about, than would have been the standard brawny-fisted swordsman, for whom I’d have felt slight empathy.
In 1975, the statement that The Enchanted Pilgramage was his only Fantasy novel. This will later become untrue of course. This statement is pretty clear that Simak was not a Sword & Sorcery fan. Or to be more accurate, a Conan fan. (I can’t imagine him not liking Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar tales.) The alpha-male who always wins does not appeal to him. And if most of us are as truthful as Clifford Simak, we don’t either. Simak certainly didn’t write any Sword & Sorcery books but the three novels he did produce are intriguing to me.
One of the things he identifies in that foreword is his over-use of Wisconsin-like settings. The Enchanted Pilgrimage might fall into this category with the novel beginning in beech and oak woods. But then again, so does Tolkien, so it may be a genre setting more than a Wisconscin one. The rafter goblin Oliver does like his cheese.
My writing has been largely colored by southwestern Wisconsin. a land of jumbled hills and deep ravines. where I spent my early years. Many of my tales have been placed in this locale. many of the kinds of people I knew there have been used as characters. I have felt slightly self-conscious at times for making such excessive use of the land I knew in boyhood, but to compensate, I have told myself that at least I stood on familiar ground. And very early in my writing efforts I learned that such pastoral scenes provided highly effective contrast to the alien beings and unearthly events I placed within the settings.
What Others Thought
Conclusion
Enchanted Pilgrimage was CDS’s first try at “Fantasy”. He would draw much closer to the commercial definition of that genre with the next two tries. In fact, maybe a little too close, writing what might be seen as “Del Rey Fantasy” books, more deserving of a Darrel K. Sweet cover. Enchanted Pilgrimage is a purer thing, part Science Fiction but truer to the author’s vision, I think. The Fellowship of Talisman and Where Evil Dwells are fine books but feel more like they are firmly within a tradition. This first novel is a hybrid, something more unusual, if that is what you seek in fat Fantasy Books (FFBs). I suppose Cliff could only write one of these, moving on as a writer from that first experiment. Like the young fellow who penned “The World of the Red Sun” (Wonder Stories, December 1931) forty-four years earlier, the 1975 CDS got to try his hand at something new and exciting. I am glad he did not stop there.
Sword & Sorcery from RAGE machine Books
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