Happy Birthday: Clifford Donald Simak (August 3, 1904 – April 25, 1988) was an American science fiction writer. He won three Hugo Awards and one Nebula Award. The Science Fiction Writers of America made him its third SFWA Grand Master, and the Horror Writers Association made him one of three inaugural winners of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement. He is associated with the pastoral science fiction subgenre.

Once John W. Campbell, at the helm of Astounding from October 1937, began redefining the field, Simak returned and was a regular contributor to Astounding Science Fiction (as it was renamed in 1938) throughout the Golden Age of Science Fiction (1938–1950). At first, as in the 1939 serial novel Cosmic Engineers, he wrote in the tradition of the earlier "super science" subgenre that E. E. "Doc" Smith perfected, but he soon developed his own style, which is usually described as gentle and pastoral. During this period, Simak also published a number of war and western stories in pulp magazines. City, a fix-up novel from this period based on short stories with a common theme of mankind's eventual exodus from Earth, won the International Fantasy Award.

Simak's stories often have a rural setting, which led to his style being described as "pastoral" or "pastoral science fiction".  Crusty individualistic backwoodsman characters often appear - for example, Hiram Taine, the protagonist of "The Big Front Yard". Hiram's dog "Towser" (sometimes "Bowser") is common to many of Simak's works. The rural setting is not always idyllic; for instance, in Ring Around the Sun, it is largely dominated by intolerance and isolationism.

[Clifford Simak was one of my all time favourite SF authors in my early reading days. He wrote some fantastic - in all senses - SF and often very different from the mainstream. If you're in any way a SF fan, and haven't already read him, you're missing a real treat.]