OBITUARIES : Science Fiction Novelist Clifford Donald Simak, 83

Clifford Donald Simak, a science fiction writer who transported the Midwestern farmers he knew as a boy to imaginary cities on other planets while plaguing them with the human dilemmas they had known on Earth, is dead.

Simak, 83, was a winner of the Hugo award--science-fiction’s equivalent of the Oscar--and was only one of a handful of authors to be honored with the Grand Master Award of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He died Monday at Riverside Medical Center in Minneapolis.

His best-known work, “City,” which deals with a future race of mankind eventually destroyed by the misuse of its own technological genius, was published in 1952. His reputation as a writer continued to develop while he pursued a career as a reporter, news editor and science editor for the Minneapolis Star and later the Minneapolis Tribune.

Other Noted Works

His other better-known works are “Way Station,” published in 1963; “The Visitors,” 1979, and “Skirmish: the Great Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak,” stories published from 1944 to 1975.

One of his stories, “How-2,” was adapted into a musical while several of his other books and short stories were translated into French, Russian, Italian and Hebrew.

In all, he wrote more than two dozen novels, several nonfiction science books and hundreds of short stories.

He received three Hugo awards and three Science Fiction Assn. of America Nebula Awards, including the Grand Master in 1977 in recognition of his entire collection of work. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1973.

Images of Boyhood

Simak was born on his grandfather’s farm in Millville, Wis. The landscape of the farm, which overlooked the joining of the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers, was transformed into mythical settings in much of his fiction.

He attended the University of Wisconsin and then taught school for several years before taking his first newspaper job in 1929. In 1939, he began his career with the Star and the Tribune.

“I was in awe of him,” Robert Franklin, who was city editor of the Tribune during part of Simak’s tenure, told the Associated Press.

“Here was a world-class author who had so much energy that, even in his 70s, he worked a full shift at the paper and then went home to write.”

He had written at home for years before achieving recognition with “City.” His first published work was “The World of the Red Sun,” which appeared in 1931. He published “The Creator” in 1935, in which humans and aliens join forces to prevent a “cone of light” from destroying the universe.

Focus on the Common

His works over the years appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, Marvel Tales and many other publications.

Many science-fiction writers wrote of invincible supermen, but Simak wrote about common people in far-off places and distant times who, like contemporary man, suffer losses along with gains.

“I have tried at times to place humans in perspective against the vastness of universal time and space,” he once said. “I have been concerned with where we, as a race, may be going and what may be our purpose in the universal scheme--if we have a purpose.

“In general, I believe we do, and perhaps an important one.”