The Thing in the Stone : And Other Stories

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Most people who have read a fair amount of Clifford D. Simak’s fiction will, if asked to give a succinct description of it, resort to mentioning robots, talking dogs, or pastoralism; few will speak of religion.

Probably that is because the term “religion,” when Simak uses it at all (and he does not actually use the very word all that often), may encompass a wide variety of subjects—from theology and philosophy, on the one hand, through ecclesiastical organizations to the most primitive of superstition. Sometimes one of those concepts will be front-and-center in a Simak story (for example Project Pope or “The Spaceman’s Van Gogh,” The Fellowship of the Talisman or “The Voice in the Void”), but often the “religious” concept is merely a part of the background, almost a sort of throwaway line. However, when viewed in the aggregate, it becomes obvious that all of those lines are there because they came to the mind of the author as he was writing. And the number of those occasions makes it clear in turn that the subject of religion was seldom far from Simak’s mind.

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