Born in 1904, Clifford D. Simak sold his first science fiction story in 1930, and was soon publishing widely in the pulp magazines. He also pursued a separate career as a journalist and writer on science and other popular topics. He gained widespread fame in the SF world with the first of his series of "City" stories, published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1944; these were collected together in the book of the same title, which has remained almost continuously in print ever since. Simak was best known for his pastoral and humanitarian themes, as exemplied in his Hugo Award-winning novel,...