The World of the Red Sun

by Clifford D. Simak

Harl Swanson and Bill Kressman leave Denver in their flying time machine, aiming to travel five millennia, but they end up some five million years later in a desolate world ruled by the evil and cruel brain Golan-Kirt.

I read this in Asimov’s anthology Before the Golden Age, which was the first SFBC book to arrive in my mailbox after going to college in Pullman in the fall of ’74.

The twentieth century. It had a remote sound, an unreal significance. In this age, with the sun a brick red ball and the city of Denver a mass of ruins, the twentieth century was a forgotten second in the great march of time, it was as remote as the age when man emerged from the beast.

“The World of the Red Sun” by Clifford D. Simak, in Wonder Stories, December 1931.

Hellhounds of the Cosmos

by Clifford D. Simak

“Hellhounds of the Cosmos” by Clifford D. Simak, Astounding Stories, June 1932.

Rule 18

by Clifford D. Simak

“Rule 18” by Clifford D. Simak, Astounding Science-Fiction, July 1938.

The Loot of Time

by Clifford D. Simak

“The Loot of Time” by Clifford D. Simak, Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1938.

Sunspot Purge

by Clifford D. Simak

“Read the News Before It Happens!” That’s the slogan that reporter Mike Hamilton proposes when the Globe buys a time machine. But when Mike goes onto the future beat, it’s more than just the stock market and the Minnesota-Wisconsin football game that he runs into—it’s the world of 2450 with only scattered population.

Think of the opportunities a time machine offers a newspaper. The other papers can tell them what has happened and what is happening, but, by Godrey, they’ll have to read the Globe to know what is going to happen.

“Sunspot Purge” by Clifford D. Simak, Astounding, November 1940.

The Street That Wasn’t There

by Carl Jacobi and Clifford D. Simak

“The Street That Wasn’t There” by Carl Jacobi and Clifford D. Simak, Comet, July 1941.

Time and Again

by Clifford D. Simak

After twenty years, Ash Sutton returns in a cracked-up ship without food, air or water—only to report that the mysterious planet that nobody can visit is no threat to Earth. But a man from the future insists that Sutton must be killed to stop a war in time; while Sutton himself, who has developed metaphysical, religious leanings, finds a copy of This Is Destiny, the very book that he is planning to write.

It would reach back to win its battles. It would strike at points in time and space which would not even know that thre was a war. It could, logically, go back to the silver mines of Athens, to the horse and chariot of Thutmosis III, to the sailing of Columbus.

Time and Again by Clifford D. Simak, in Galaxy, October to December 1950 [3-part serial].

The Fence

by Clifford D. Simak

This is a nice short story that touches briefly on one of my personal pet tropes, the time viewer, but which is really once again a paranoid sort of piece—it seems that people in the future live lives of complete leisure, so who is providing for us?

“The Fence” by Clifford D. Simak, Space Science Fiction, September 1952.

Project Mastodon

by Clifford D. Simak

Wes Adams, Johnny Cooper and Chuck Hudson (chums since boyhood) build a time machine and proceed to do exactly what you or I would do: Go back 150,000 years, found the new Republic of Mastodonia somewhere in pre-Wisconsin, and seek diplomatic recognition from the United States of America.

If you guys ever travel in time, you’ll run up against more than you bargain for. I don’t mean the climate or the terrain or the fauna, but the economics and the politics.

“Project Mastodon” by Clifford D. Simak, in Galaxy, March 1955.

Carbon Copy

by Clifford D. Simak

“Carbon Copy” by Clifford D. Simak, Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1957.

Over the River and Through the Woods

by Clifford D. Simak

“Over the River and Through the Woods” by Clifford D. Simak, Amazing Stories, May 1965.

Small Deer

by Clifford D. Simak

Alton James has a bent for all things mechanical and an interest in dinosaurs, so when his mathematically minded friend describes how a time machine should be built, Alton builds it and heads for 65 million B.C. to see what killed off the dinosaurs.

We were lucky, that was all. We could have sent that camera back another thousand times, perhaps, and never caught a mastodon—probably never caught a thing. Although we would have known it had moved in time, for the landscape had been different, although not a great deal different. But from the landscape we could not have told if it had gone back a hundred or a thousand years. When we saw the mastadon, however, we knew we’d sent the camera back 10,000 years at least.

I won’t bore you with how we worked out a lot of problems on our second model, or how Dennis managed to work out a time-meter that we could calibrate to send the machine a specific distance into time. Because all this is not important. What is important is what I found when I went into time.

I’ve already told you I’d read your book about Cretaceous dinosaurs and I liked the entire book, but that final chapter about the extinction of the dinosaurs is the one that really got me. Many a time I’d lie awake at night thinking about all the theories you wrote about and trying to figure out in my own mind how it really was.

So when it was time to get into that machine and go, I knew where I would be headed.

“Small Deer” by Clifford D. Simak, in Galaxy, October 1965.

Why Call Them Back from Heaven?

by Clifford D. Simak

Why Call Them Back from Heaven? by Clifford D. Simak (Gollancz, 1967).

The Goblin Reservation

by Clifford D. Simak

Professor Peter Maxwell sets out for one of the Coonskin planets, but his beam is intercepted and later returned to Earth only to find that his beam was actually duplicated, his duplicate has been killed, and his friends (some goblins, a ghost, and a time-traveling Neanderthal among others) have already buried him.

I wonder whether this was the first transporter accident story (which, as we all know, eventually leads to two Will Rikers).

You mean there were two Pete Maxwells?

The Goblin Reservation by Clifford D. Simak, in Galaxy, Apr-Jun 1968.

Our Children’s Children

by Clifford D. Simak

Our Children’s Children by Clifford D. Simak, 2 pts, Worlds of If, May/June 1973 and July/August 1973.

The Marathon Photograph

by Clifford D. Simak

I feel for one character in this story: Humphrey, who wants no more than to figure out the various goings on—past, present and possibly future—in this out-of-the-way place where Andrew Thornton comes to fish and write a geology text. Andrew’s friend Neville Piper finds a cube with a hologram of the Battle of Marathon alongside the bear-mauled body of the mysterious Stefan from the even more mysterious Lodge, and that long-lost mine that Humphrey has been researching is finally found without Humphrey ever being told of it.

Humphrey did mind, naturally, but there was nothing he could do about it. Here was the chance to go up to the Lodge, probably to go inside it, and he was being counted out. But he did what he had to do with fairly good grace and said that he would stay.

“The Marathon Photograph” by Clifford D. Simak, in Threads of Time, edited by Robert Silverberg (Thomas Nelson, 1974).

The Marathon Photograph

by Clifford D. Simak

“The Marathon Photograph” by Clifford D. Simak, in Threads of Time, edited by Robert Silverberg (Thomas Nelson, 1974).

The Birch Clump Cylinder

by Clifford D. Simak

When a contraption drops onto the Coon Creek Institute causing various objects to appear and disappear from out of time, Old Prather calls together three former students: someone with expertise in time travel (our discredited time-travel researcher and narrator, Charley Spencer), one who’s a mean-spirited, world-famous mathematician (Leonard Asbury), and with no preconceptions about the matter (the lovely composer, Mary Holland, who broken more than one heart on the campus).

A time machine has fallen into a clump of birch just above the little pond back of the machine shops.

“The Birch Clump Cylinder” by Clifford D. Simak, in Stellar 1, edited by Judy-Lynn de Rey (Ballantine Books, September 1974).

Shakespeare’s Planet

by Clifford D. Simak

Shakespeare’s Planet by Clifford D. Simak (Berkeley Books, May 1976).

Mastodonia

by Clifford D. Simak

Asa Steele buys a farm near his boyhood farm in southwestern Wisconsin where the loyal Bowser and his simple friend Hiram talk to a lonely time-traveling alien who opens time roads for the three of them.

Maybe it takes gently crazy people and simpletons and dogs to do things we can’t do. Maybe they have abilities we don’t have.. . .

Mastodonia by Clifford D. Simak (Del Rey, March 1978).

Highway of Eternity

by Clifford D. Simak

Jay Corcoran and Tom Boone are trying to track down a missing client when the building they are in is demolished and the two of them jump into a time machine that takes them to one of the pockets of rebels from the far future who are resisting the decorporealization of man.

Horace, the hardheaded, practical lout, the organizer, the schemer. Emma, the moaner, the keeper of our consciences. Timothy, the student. Enid, the thinker. And I, the loafer, the bad example, the one who makes the others feel virtuous.

Highway of Eternity by Clifford D. Simak (Del Rey, June 1986).