The Shipshape Miracle : And Other Stories

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In 1976, when Clifford D. Simak was in the process of retiring from his long career with the Minneapolis Star/Tribune, he told an interviewer that he had “always wanted to be a newspaperman, but realized my creative urges could not be satisfied by writing news.”

The result was that Cliff had two careers—careers that ran in tandem for more than forty years, causing Robert A. Heinlein to marvel, knowing—as he said—that the two types of writing required were vastly different.

Among other things, this meant that Cliff Simak’s newspaper training strongly influenced his fiction. Some would come to criticize his literary style as a “lack of style” (thus betraying a preoccupation with form over substance); but it seems clear that, like the professional newspaperman he was, Simak tried to avoid allowing stylistic flourishes to get in the way of his exposition of the facts of the story—prose, he believed, is not supposed to distract from the plot (well, that was the theory, but once in a while, perhaps unable to stop himself, he would drop in a gem of a line). Robert Silverberg saw this, and described Simak’s work as having a “clear, precise, straightforward narrative style.”

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