Dusty Zebra: and Other Stories by Clifford D. Simak

Author:Clifford D. Simak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-04-27T19:06:02+00:00

Retrograde Evolution

This story was named “The Googles Are a Funny Race” when Clifford D. Simak sent it to Sam Moskowitz in November 1952. The following April, Cliff was paid $270 for it, at about the same time that the story, having been renamed, was published in the second issue of Hugo Gernsback’s doomed magazine, Science Fiction Plus.

Gernsback, perhaps abusing his status as one of the founding fathers of magazine science fiction, included in that same issue a long editorial in which he excoriated “pseudo science-fiction,” by which he meant stories, represented as science fiction, that were based on “science” that was not possible—an attitude that would, a few months later, lead him to take unusual liberties with a different Simak story, “Target Generation” (you can find that story in volume seven of this series, which is entitled A Death in the House and Other Stories).

But for the purpose of publishing “Retrograde Evolution,” Gernsback made a number of changes to Cliff’s story—including one that likely amuses the modern reader: he changed the name of the alien race featured in the story, “Googles,” to “Kzyzz”—a name, he explained in a dreadful footnote purportedly written by the author of the story, which was given them because of the “strange sibilant sound” they made while eating. I do not believe for an instant that the change was Cliff’s idea, and I will always wonder what his reaction was to Gernsback’s alterations—the situation, after all, was complicated, since it was Gernsback who had published the very first piece of Cliff’s fiction to appear before the public, more than two decades earlier … In any case, along with deleting the footnote, I’ve reversed that change, and several others, for this publication.

—dww

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