The Big Front Yard discussion

Overall, I enjoyed Cosmic Engineers and don't at all regret the time spent reading it.
I was, though, disappointed by the silly time travel into a potential future, then the crazy duel game thought up by the Goblin King.
It was interesting that genocide of the Hellhounds was debated for about two lines, then agreed as an absolute moral good. Let's kill those buggers.
I kinda saw the end twist coming (maybe BSG ripped off Simak, too, no?) and didn't really care. The timespans at work here are ridiculously vague and hard to care about.
I wish I had access to Damon Knight's full review. Wikipedia tells me that Knight thought of Cosmic Engineers as "a pot-boiler [which] should have been left interred" and noted that the 70th-century's inhabitants "talk, think, and act exactly like middle-class, middle-intellect 1930s Americans."
I definitely enjoyed reading Cosmic Engineers, but more so as an introduction to themes that Simak would develop more fully later in his career than as a great work on its own.

That's a concise way to put it, but I'd go even further and say that this could be, like most of the stories I've read by Simak, a story that exists in the same, for lack of a better term, universe as others by him. I see the once glorious, but now abandoned and decaying city on the far, far future Earth in this book as being the same city in his novel of the same name; and the reference to humans leaving Earth to go to distant stars leaves open the possibility that this is the same group of people that left the planet in A Choice of Gods, which I always think of as being connected to both A Heritage of Stars and a couple others. Etc.

By the way, John I found the chapter where Herb and Caroline travel into the future as being the most well written and interesting of the entire book. I think the imagined future human was well thought out; interesting how a pre-roswell incident mind would invent the evolved human form as being strikingly similar to what is now popularly referred to as a "gray" extra terrestrial (enlarged head, spindly limbs, protruding chest), a form that some believers would say in a more highly evolved species or even time traveling humans.

More on all the stuff in this story that has been... er... recycled in more contemporary sci fi later. I need to go back and scan the book for all of it because I picked out easily five to ten things that made me thing of BSG, Star Wars, etc.

And does anyone else get the impression that the whole "Hellhounds" subplot was a complete afterthought and more or less filler? The whole book would make more sense and flow better without it.

Huh. I thought that the time travel itself, at least, would annoy you. It's not even strict no-nonsense time travel. It's fuzzy-wuzzy shadow potentiality multiple worlds time travel.
As for the conversation with the last human, I guess it grated on me in the way it glossed over real difficulties. The last man's best philosophical guess is that we've all been dreamed up by an author like Simak? Quite right. I like how Simak uses this notion later to have Gary worry about all of the plot contrivances and then excuse them as the work of this dreaming god. Made me smile.
Philosophically and religiously, Simak has often struck me as falling into some sort of humanocentric pantheism (or maybe panentheism). Maybe I'm confusing my eastern religious ideas, but there's a definite Taoism going on. When the last man reveals the secrets of eternity, he can only explain this in terms of nothing being everything and everything being nothing. I am the eggman, they are the eggmen. I am the walrus, goo goo goo joob.
"So it is that existence and non-existence give birth the one to (the idea of) the other; that difficulty and ease produce the one (the idea of) the other; that length and shortness fashion out the one the figure of the other; that (the ideas of) height and lowness arise from the contrast of the one with the other; that the musical notes and
tones become harmonious through the relation of one with another; and that being before and behind give the idea of one following another." -from the Tao te ching
As Caroline understands the mystery of the Tao, it enables her to become as a god, shaping the universe at will.
The entire ending of hyperspheres and shaping space completely lost me. Simak glosses over all of this and gives no real idea of the scale of these ideas. I couldn't visualize what he was getting at in any solid way. It all seemed like so much space magic in the end. Which, maybe, is all that it could be, given the giant scope of Simak's imagination at this point. I respect him for thinking big, but there's not enough there to support the bigness besides a magic hand waving and saying it's so.
Back to the semi-religiosity of Simak, I don't want to make TOO much of it. More than anything, I see an optimistic Western Humanism that was fashionable at that point in the 20th century. I'm thinking specifically of the memoir Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that was published the same year that Engineers was serialized. And also of the ending of Chaplin's The Great Dictator, which was released the next year.
http://youtu.be/QcvjoWOwnn4
As for the Hellhounds, I didn't have a problem with their introduction and their use as a bogeyman. But, the resolution of that story thread is less than satisfactory, as I think that the entire end is a bit muddled and rushed.

I do like that Simak is *cautiously* optimistic about space travel and space colonization. He sets it WAAAAYY out there in the future.
I often think of Wendell Berry's caution on space colonization:
"humans are destructive in proportion to their supposition of abundance; if they are faced with an infinite abundance, then they will become infinitely destructive."
http://www.nss.org/settlement/nasa/Co...