The Shipshape Miracle: And Other Stories

About Clifford D. Simak

During his fifty-five-year career CLIFFORD D. SIMAK produced some of the most iconic science fiction stories ever written. Born in 1904 on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin Simak got a job at a small-town newspaper in 1929 and eventually became news editor of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune writing fiction in his spare time. Simak was best known for the book City a reaction to the horrors of World War II and for his novel Way Station. In 1953 City was awarded the International Fantasy Award and in following years Simak won three Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award. In 1977 he became the third Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and before his death in 1988 he was named one of three inaugural winners of the Horror Writers Associations Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.   DAVID W. WIXON was a close friend of Clifford D. Simaks. As Simaks health declined Wixon already familiar with science fiction publishing began more and more to handle such things as his friends business correspondence and contract matters. Named literary executor of the estate after Simaks death Wixon began a long-term project to secure the rights to all of Simaks stories and find a way to make them available to readers who given the fifty-five-year span of Simaks writing career might never have gotten the chance to enjoy all of his short fiction. Along the way Wixon also read the authors surviving journals and rejected manuscripts which made him uniquely able to provide Simaks readers with interesting and thought-provoking commentary that sheds new light on the work and thought of a great writer.