Clifford Simak was a prolific writer of short stories, mostly science fiction starting in the 1930s when the genre was new, and initially the stories were sold individually to magazines. They have been curated and released digitally by his friend, David W. Wixon, who provides a forward and brief, interesting notes before each one. My thanks go to Open Road Media and Net Galley for the DRC, which I received in July of 2017 in exchange for this very tardy but honest review.

Open Road offers the entire Simak collection in a series, and as a fan of old school science fiction--the sort that doesn't make inside jokes for programmers and code writers--I have been snapping them up. I read #1, #4, and #7-10 and loved them all, and so I settled happily down to read this one. The introduction by Wixon is perhaps the best of the notes I have seen so far, and the first story, Dusty Zebra, is uproarious. I loved it. After that, not so much.

In addition to having written a ton of science fiction and a few westerns, which were hugely popular in the 1950s and early 1960s, Simak also wrote a few World War II stories, primarily during and shortly after the war. These are not stories that have aged well. There are a whole raft of ugly racist terms used in them that were horrifyingly common among Caucasian Americans during that time period. We are better people now, most of us, and so reading this sort of thing puts my teeth on edge. I skipped around in the collection some, but even those that contained none of this crap somehow failed to hold my attention. I moved to the last story, since short stories are often bookended with the strongest selections, and I didn't care for it either; it wasn't offensive, but it also wasn't interesting. Simak sometimes struggled with dialogue, and so dialogue-heavy selections are usually not his best work.

Open Road doesn't post on Net Galley anymore, but I still have one more of their Simak collections, #12, and I intend to read it and review it. With 6 excellent collections and 1 mostly lousy one, I like my odds. But for fans of wonderful science fiction, I recommend turning to one of the others noted above, all of which I have reviewed. Simak's work is great more often than not, and I still encourage you to read it; in fact, since it's selling cheaply, you could even buy this one for the title story if you have a mind to. But you'll get more bang for your buck by turning to the others first.

Metaphorosis Reviews
3.5 stars

This as a very uneven collection. Some of the stories are among Simak's very best, and others are no more than adequate. To those who dropped in for Simak's trademark good-hearted, pleasant heroes, the included WW II action story is shocking in its attitudes and language. Even allowing for its circumstances and time frame, it's unpleasant to read. But some stories are terrific, so just skip that one. And one of them has an early use of the the word Google (as the name of an alien race). The best stories are:

Dusty Zebra - a familiar 'trade with aliens' story, but with a wry sense of humor.
Hobbies - part of the City sequence, this is a slow-moving, slow-building story with a strong ending.
Retrograde Evolution - as with "Hobbies", a story with a strong message about responsibility.