New Folks' Home : And Other Stories

Начало книги

Those who have read more than the occasional piece of Clifford D. Simak’s fiction—and done so with some attention—may have noticed two things about the names of his characters. One is that Cliff repeats names, or portions of names, and uses them over and over despite any relationship among them. Characters in several stories (including “How-2” and “Eternity Lost,” for instance) are named Anson Lee, and he uses Anson as a first name in his novel Why Call Them Back from Heaven? I have found nothing in Cliff’s past life to indicate that the name was based on someone he might have known. Nor is that true with regard to the name Horton, which appears in at least four of Cliff’s novels—sometimes as a first name, sometimes last (see Ring Around the Sun, Shakespeare’s Planet, Out of Their Minds, and The Werewolf Principle).

Not so with Parker. Again, Cliff sometimes uses it as a first name, sometimes last (as in Thomas Parker in “The Whistling Well”). But Parker was the maiden name of Cliff’s maternal grandmother, a person who clearly had a special place in his life. (Her first name was Ellen, which Cliff named his only daughter and used in “Over the River and Through the Woods”: He clearly modeled the protagonist, Ellen Forbes, after his grandmother.) And the name Carson, which turns up frequently in the earlier Simak stories, is that of his brother.

Читать дальше →