Clifford D Simak

A plantation owner on an alien world tracks the strange animal Cytha and gets a lesson in xeno-ecology. Some things are better left alone.

The paper had gone to press, graphically describing the latest of the many horrible events which had been enacted upon the Earth in the last six months. The headlines screamed that Six Corners, a little hamlet in Pennsylvania, had been wiped out by the Horror. Another front-page story told of a Terror in the Amazon Valley which had sent the natives down the river in babbling fear. Other stories told of deaths here and there, all attributable to the...

An ageless hermit runs a secret way station for alien visitors in the Wisconsin woods in this Hugo Award–winning science fiction classic Enoch Wallace is not like other humans. Living a secluded life in the backwoods of Wisconsin, he carries a nineteenth-century rifle and never seems to age-a fact that has recently caught the attention of prying government eyes. The truth is, Enoch is the last surviving veteran of the American Civil War and, for...

Tensions rise and terror runs rampant when the residents of a small town are trapped within the confines of their village by an invasive force from an alternate dimension. Nothing much ever happens in Millville, a small, secluded Middle-American community--until the day Brad Carter discovers he is unable to leave. It's not just the nearly bankrupt real estate agent who's being held prisoner; every other resident is also being confined within the town's...

A reporter uncovers a terrifying conspiracy, in this thrilling classic from a Science Fiction Grand Master. After a night out on the town, Parker Graves returns home to life-threatening danger. The science reporter for the local newspaper barely misses a bear trap sitting on his doorstep. Then, the object transforms into what looks like a bowling ball and rolls off into the night all by itself. He begins to obsess over the question-Who put the...

An enormous, mysterious box descends upon smalltown Minnesota, spelling trouble for the world, in this classic adventure from a Science Fiction Grand Master. Forestry student Jerry Conklin is fly-fishing when something huge lands on his car, crushing it into the earth. It looks like a big black box-about fifty feet high and two hundred feet long-and the object stirs up quite a commotion among the townspeople of Lone Pine, Minnesota. One of them...

A human space traveler trapped on a remote planet must somehow unravel a confounding alien technology-or else surrender himself to a host of incomprehensible horrors For thousands of years, Carter Horton has been traveling across the galaxy toward a distant world capable of supporting human life. At journey's end, awakened from his millennia-long sleep by a curiously adaptive android, he is informed that his crewmates have all perished due to a system...

A motley collection of humans and one robot, all from alternate universes, must make their way through a strange alien puzzle-world of danger and mystery in this classic science fiction allegory by an award-winning maestro. Following a conversation with a talking slot machine, Professor Edward Lansing finds himself mysteriously transported to a tavern on a long and empty road. It is immediately obvious to the educator that he is no longer on campus...