A lone man trapped on an alien planet2 May 2012tI have been reading over some of the old science-fiction short stories that I wrote probably about 10 to 15 years ago (and no, they are not published, thank God) and I must admit that these stories are far inferior to some of the science-fiction that I have read recently. In a way they were my attempt at imagining what would be a good science-fiction television series but because making a television series is quite expensive, I put them down in book form instead. However, just because I look back at them and consider them to be of poor quality, it does not necessarily mean that they are unpublishable, they are simply unpublishable in their current form.tHowever, I mention this in contrast to this story which I thought was brilliant. The story is about a lone man who was frozen, placed in a sub-light ship, and then sent out into the galaxy to locate a suitable planet for colonisation. Unfortunately not everything went to plan in that the other three occupants of the ship all died leaving poor Carter Horton alone with a robot. However, as it turns out, he is not the only person on this planet as he meets an alien named Carnavore, and discovers that a human named Shakespeare had died just before he arrived.tIn a way this is what I have come to expect of good science-fiction in that it is a means to explore, philosophically, where we as humans are headed. This is not the only story that I have read which involves a sub-light colony ship being sent out into space and then thousands of years later the inhabitant of the ship discovers that time has meant that he can no longer return home because his home no longer exists. In a way, the idea of space exploration that comes out in this story is that once you chose to do it then there will never be any going home. In a way it is like exploration of Earth, however there was never any leap frogging of technology in that when Captain Cook set sail from England for Australia, he did not arrive to discover that supersonic flight at been invented. This is why, in many cases, stories like this are speculative, and in a way it has only been in the Twentieth Century that such speculative looks into the future have come to the fore. It is strange that many of the pre-20th Century books do not deal with the future, but with the present, whereas now we deal with the present by looking into the future.tSimak, in this book, seems to explore alien life, and the aliens that he creates are truly alien. While Carnavore is a humanoid warrior alien, I actually quite liked him. He is a carnivore, but he is a friendly carnivore. It is suggested that he cannot be trusted, but it turns out that it is only when it comes to monsters that he shows his true colours, and it is because his people seek glory through killing, but not just any type of killing, but killing something that is a challenge, namely a monster. Then we have pond, and pond is probably the most alien of the creatures in this story, though I really do not want to go too deep into this character because it will give too much away.tIn a way this story is a mystery. Carter Horton wakes up after what he believes to be 1000 years, and those around him, namely the ship and the robot Nichodemus, all believe that it is 1000 years. However, time dilation, as is determined by Einstein's theory, has a role to play. While one may travel for what they believe to be 1000 years, in fact time dilation means that it takes much longer to travel than we experience. It is like taking a train journey that our watch says takes only 20 minutes, however when we arrive at our destination we discover that in reality two hours have passed. I would suggest that the closest we can come to that is when we cross a time zone, however it is not the same because even if we cross a time zone, the time we take to travel does not change, however the theory of relativity says that the faster we go, the slower we experience time.tIn a way as we read this book we are exploring a mysterious planet, but even then we are only exploring a small section of this planet. There is this character named Shakespeare, and we are led to believe that it is the Bard, but it actually is not (some commentators have seemed to have missed this). The reason he earns the name Shakespeare is because he has a book of the complete works of William Shakespeare. Then there is the gateway, the technological device that allows people to pass great distances to other habitable planets. However it still baffles me why Horton did not leave that way, but maybe because he chose to go with his ship rather than with the woman. Me, I probably would have gone with the woman because I see no reason why I would want to go with the ship (with the exception that the ship is an intelligent lifeform, and nobody seems to want to stay on this planet).tThis is one of those really good books that I thoroughly enjoyed as I read, and in a way it wants to suck me into more books of it's style. I doubt there is a sequel, and there really does not need to be one. Instead, we move onto the next story with new characters set in new places. Still, I enjoyed this book and it is a shame not to know what became of Carter Horton or where those tunnels led.
my first clifford d. simak read -- i got it and cemetery world at the same time, and since this one had "from the author of cemetery world" on the cover, i thought i'd save it for later, and start here. the book starts abruptly, and it takes a while before the sf world starts to gel.. however once i understood the milieu i'd been dropped into, the story fell into its natural rhythms and made sense to me in its fantastic way -- the opposite effect from jonathan lethem's gun, with occasional music, which i recently read, and couldn't help being distracted by discordance i felt the sf effects brought to his story. the sf elements serve the story here, and very effectively. for some reason i am reading a lot of books lately that stop and philosophize, and this is more of the same. there are two major strands here: the main narrative adventure part of the story, and then the philosophical flip side represented by the three faces of the Ship. i wasn't blown away, but i am intrigued.
What do You think about Shakespeare's Planet (1988)?
'A ship, one man, one flat-footed stupid robot - Christ, what an expedition! And, furthermore, a pointless one-way expedition.'An exploratory spaceship from Earth takes a thousand years to find a suitable planet for life. Only one of the human crew survives the journey in cold storage, Carter Horton, a geologist. He has a telepathic relationship with Ship, which itself consists of three very different uploaded minds. The robot is called Nicodemus, an all-purpose droid.But they immediately find that they are not alone on Murak. They are greeted by a nasty looking alien with a skull for a face and large teeth called Carnovore ("I welcome you," he said, "to this asshole of a planet.") and what's more, he claims that Carter is not the first human visitor, that a man named Shakespeare had been his friend there. It's hard not to like Simak. He takes you to strange places with bizarre beings and asks all kinds of interesting questions in his work, on this occasion about friendship, Time, different types of existence and the very nature of the universe itself. I guess that's what most sci-fi writers do, but what separates Simak is the oddball behaviour and offbeat dialogue of his characters, which tends to leave you the impression that really he's just having a laugh and pulling you leg. 'Shakespeare's Planet' is a fairly representative example of everything that's wonky and wonderfl about his writing.
—Perry Whitford
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2156451.html[return][return]One of Simak's typically low-key stories, with lots of interesting ideas - the central character has been in cold-sleep for a thousand years, and is the only living human survivor on a ship whose central computer merges three people's personalities; Shakespeare's Planet itself is the end point for a network of poorly understood interstellar transport tunnels, where the only intelligent creature mildly regrets eating the human known as Shakespeare a while back; periodic psychic shock hits everyone left alive every now and then; a woman turns up from Earth to investigate, but the situation s resolved by inhuman and incomprehensible forces. It's a bit like a combination of Red Dwarf with the end of A Handful of Dust. Not especially memorable but quite typical of Simak's style.
—Nicholas Whyte
Carter Horton came to Shakespeare's Planet the hard way. He spent a thousand years in frozen sleep to arrive at the first planet away from Earth that can support life. Now he is stranded with Ship, his almost human transportation and Nicodemus, his android companion. Yet he was not the first human on the planet, William Shakespeare stumbled across it when he entered a strange tunnel. While long dead, Shakespeare is remembered by another stranded inhabitant called Carnivore, the creature that befriended Shakespeare and ultimately ate him. It appears to be a decent planet yet something is not quite right. In fact, it is very wrong.This is the premise of Simak's excellent novel titled Shakespeare's Planet. Certainly more obscure than the classics, City and Way Station but almost their equal. Again Simak earns his title as the pastoralist of science fiction. While he is comfortable with spaceships, robots, and alien technology, it is the pastoral setting and the meanderings of his humans and aliens that carry the tale. Simak is fascinated with the question of where mankind is headed and what it will leave as its destiny but Simak finds that meaning hidden in individuals and their intimate interactions not in epic tales. There is no science fiction writer quite like Simak.
—Marvin
