Even though I was always interested in science fiction, I really never read very widely. I honestly cannot think of anything I read which was not connected to a TV show or movie (e.g. Star Trek, 2001, Hitchhikers Guide). After I started playing D&D I veered off into fantasy, which was most of my fiction reading for many years. As I have gotten older I have found that my diet of mainly non-fiction books was hard to maintain, so I now always try to have two books in progress: one non-fiction, and one fiction, when I get tired of reading the former, I will read the latter. This is a good strategy and has increased how many books I am able to get through. As such I have started reading older classic science fiction, many from Appendix N.
I don’t remember how, but a few years ago I happened upon the works of Clifford Simak. I read The Way Station and really liked it. It felt different from so much science fiction, it had a meditative pace and focused on the characters rather than on gadgets and guns. It was a beautiful story and I felt better having read it.
As I was looking through his other books I noticed The Goblin Reservation and that name rang a bell. I know I saw that name before. Then I remembered…
The first time I played D&D the DM put the giant map of the City State of the Invincible Overlord onto the table. That map was full of delicious details, and I wanted to be there. At that moment I was hooked on D&D. I studied every detail on that map, so, even after all these years, I remembered an odd detail: the area on the map labeled “goblin reservation”. Given that Simak’s book was published 8 years earlier, this cannot be a coincidence, I suspect that is an “Easter egg” and a homage to Simak. If anyone has any evidence to back up this conjecture, I am all ears.
I have just finished the book and it was a fun read. Simak clearly did not believe in the division between science fiction and fantasy, and he gleefully mixed them all up, but somehow still kept it a believable, compelling story. This mashup reminded me of some D&D adventures with similar genre jumbles, like the classic Expedition to the Barrier Peaks or some Judges Guild adventures.
Yet another coincidence is that Simak was born the same year as my grandmother, and both of them had fathers who emigrated from Bohemia. Further, he was born and raised in the same county where my grandmother also spent her early years (from 1910 to 1926) about 30 miles away from each other. Furthermore, when I saw his photo on Wikipedia, I was immediately saw a resemblance to my uncles on the Czech side of the family. But on the other hand, his mother descends from early settlers in New England, and it appears we are 9th cousins, maybe less. In the course of finding that, I noticed that one of his great uncles lived in Lake Geneva, WI.
So for all these reasons, I feel an odd connection with Simak, and his works will be on my to read list for some time. Let me know what I should read next.