Why Call Them Back From Heaven by Clifford D. Simak
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1967
Clifford Simak is one of the most important voices of 20th-century science fiction, and he is largely forgotten outside of serious SF circles. His books crowd the shelves at used bookstores, and several are considered classics. I prefer his work to Ray Bradbury but he doesn’t have the cultural impact or name recognition. Not even as well-known as Heinlein or Asimov whom he inspired. Bradbury’s reputation for pastoral fantasy comes from a short part of his childhood in the Midwest but he was a Los Angelino really. Simak on the other hand was a lifelong Midwesterner.
Simak was publishing SF when Asimov was a teenager. He went to high school on a horse before his Wisconsin village had roads for cars. His very far-out idea-driven SF has a unique feel because of how midwestern his point of view was. His novel City is one of the most singular novels about our species dying because the end was inspired by Simak’s loathing of city life.
SWCTBH was written and released five decades into his SF career, an amazing accomplishment for any writer. So one of the reasons this book was ALREADY on my TBR was a desire for a picture of what Simak was doing in 1967, a time when the New Wave dominated. Philip K. Dick wrote Galactic Pot Healer that year, and Brunner was doing edits on Stand on Zanzibar. Leguin was two years from releasing Left Hand of Darkness, and Vonnegut was moving mainstream. Heinlein won the Hugo for Moon is a Harsh Mistress beating a more deserving Babel-17 by Delany (in my opinion) Exciting time in SF and mostly in the next generation.
Three years after winning the Hugo award himself for the pastoral Way Station Simak wrote a thought-provoking philosophical surrealist SF novel Why Call Them Back From Heaven? It is not an action novel, it doesn’t have the pulp strength of City, and for my money, this might be my second favorite of Simak’s novels.
I read this novel because fellow Sci-fi historian Jochim Boaz brought up this novel during a podcast we recorded about Simak, and I knew I was going to bump it up my list of stuff to read. The Link to that episode is here… You can hear the moment that I decided to read this book, and of course get lots of Simak talk.
WCTBFH is about immortality, and more specifically economics and capitalism. The details of how immortality reminds me of the current affordable housing crisis in the U.S. Tons of people are having children but no one is building housing for them.
The Forever Center in the context of the novel has not figured out how immortality works, but it is close. This starts a race for people to put themselves on ice, the problem is there are not enough resources to wake them up. This presents the core conflict of the novel. Unlike the majority of his novels, the future is not natural or pastoral. The society is urban and overcrowded. Worse much like our society is a capitalist race towards acquiring things. In this future, it is about amassing capital for your death/afterlife.
“A man had to live, this first life, as long as he was able, it was the only opportunity that he had to lay away competence for his second wife. And when every effort of the society in which he lived was bent towards the end of the prolongation of his life, it would never do to let a piece of carelessness or an exaggerated sense of economy (such as flinching at the cost of a piece of padding or the reorganizing of a buffer) to rob him of the years needed to talk away the capital he would need in the life to come.”
Much of the novel is built around the impacts of a world trying to adapt to civilization, think about how hard we have to work for our short lives now live thousands of years. Of course, the novel touches briefly on the resources it would take.
“… it doesn't matter that it's a little swampy. The human race will need every foot of land there is upon the earth. There will come a time perhaps, when the earth will be just one big building and…”
“But there's space travel, too.” the woman said. “All those planets out there…”
“Madam,” said the salesman, “let's be realistic for a moment they've been out there 100 years or more and they have found no planets that a man could live on…”
Simak doesn’t often idealize the space frontier, this trap even the typically pessimistic PKD fell into in the fifties. But much like Kim Stanley Robinson made the point recently in Aurora, Simak suggests that Earth is rare in the ability to support human life, and the price or immorality may be a crowded Earth.
The collection of wealth takes on a whole new meaning when life never ends.
“No! No! Protested Gibbons. “Not apply for death they'd suspect something if you did arrange your death. A very natural death. Give me ten thousand of the loot and I'll get it done for you. That's the going rate. Very neat and easy. And the investment, of course, couldn't be in forever center stock. Something you could stash away a bunch of paintings, maybe.”
Another interesting part of this equation that Simak builds is the divide that would develop between those who would engineer a death that preserved them for immortality and those born to it.
“And now I understand, said the grizzled man, “that in just a few years a man need not even go through the ritual of death to attain immortality. Once Forever Center has this immortality business all written down and the methods all worked out, a man will be made immortal out of hand. So just stay young and go on living and there won't be any death once you get born, then you will live forever.”
The writing itself is great, and playful at times. Chapter 9 is a single sentence that doesn’t get paid off or explained until nearly the end. Chapter 23 is a beautiful meditation on the whole scope of the novel through the eyes of an older woman in a rocking chair thinking about the next thousand.
“Would the lilacs smell as sweet, Mona Campbell wondered, when spring came around a thousand years from now? Could one still catch the breath in wonder at the sight of a meadow filled with daffodils a thousand years from now. If it were a thousand years from now would any room remain on earth for lilac or for daffodil?”
I mean the entire chapter is beautiful. I kind of wanted to post the whole thing. I don’t think most Sci-fi critics or fans consider this top-tier Simak, but I love this novel. This is a must-read for any fans of 20th-century SF who want to read works from a more literary angle.
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