Pun Salad

Back in my youth, a book by Clifford D. Simak was an automatic buy. It helped that I was a member of the Science Fiction Book Club for a while, and they invariably featured his latest novel as a pick-of-the-month.

For some odd reason, these books languished on my shelves, mostly unread. I have no good explanation for that. Between cheap SFBC hardbacks and paperbacks, I counted 19. (And there are a bunch more I don't own.)

So: a new reading project was born. I fed these 19 titles into my book-picking system, and this one was the first up. It is from 1975, and the paperback cost me $1.25. Amazon will charge you more these days.

It is set on Earth, but an oddball one. There are Terran flora and fauna, the sun rises in the east, and so on. But there are non-humans aplenty; a goblin appears in Chapter One, soon to be followed by ogres, witches, gnomes,‥ The reader might ask: are we talking about a forgotten past, a strange future, or what? Neither, as it turns out, but I don't want to spoil a half-century-old book for you.

Anyway, the book opens with a scholar, Mark Cornwall, discovering a short manuscript hidden in a dusty tome in a candlelit university library. This is surreptitiously observed by a monk. And both Cornwall and the monk are being spied on by the "rafter goblin", Oliver. All note the importance of the hidden text. The monk informs a local bunch of cutthroats of Cornwall's find … and here's why you shouldn't trust a cutthroat: the monk gets his throat cut for his troubles.

But Oliver seeks out Cornwall to warn him that he's in mortal peril for being in posession of this manuscript. Cornwall takes the opportunity to light out on a dangerous quest to uncover the secrets described in his find. He also accumulates a ragtag crew of co-pilgrims, each with their own reason for helping out.

It's a lot of fun. Simak's prose style is unfancy, garnished with occasional dry wit. Think "Minnesota Nice" in print.