“I am convinced that I am by nature a simple rustic, whose genuine aesthetic sympathies are excited only by rural virtues and scenery, and to whom the pastoral is therefore the only authentic medium of expression.” — H.P. Lovecraft, letter to the Gallomo, 31st August 1921.
While trying to get a working handle on the more serious side of Simak’s output, and along the way work out why such a major author dropped off the radar so rapidly and totally between about 1986 and 1996, I noted a small range of authors being described as writing similarly “pastoral SF”.
For what it’s worth, here’s the prospective author list I jotted down for the sort of American sci-fi small-town/pastoral sub-genre which drifts in location between the farm and the suburb on the edge of the farmlands and woods. These are writers who seem to fit with Simak’s wistful vision of small semi-rural communities on a fruitfully-settled American frontier, rather than being a wider grab-bag of general ‘living planet / terraforming saga / farm-hand to space-pilot’ eco-writers. It’s in rough chronological order…
* Ray Bradbury (for the ‘small-town’ tales and novels, and the settling-of-Mars The Martian Chronicles in its 1997 version with “Usher II” skipped).
* [Clifford D. Simak].
* Tom Reamy (Blind Voices, and San Diego Lightfoot Sue and Other Stories).
* Some of Ardath Mayhar.
* R.A. Lafferty.
* Andy Duncan.
* Steve Erikson (Apparently he does American pastorals that are akin to Simak, as well as his generic-looking ‘epic fantasy’ series? I could only find his “Fishin’ with Grandma Matchie”, though).
* Christopher Rowe (The new Telling the Map).
* Fenton Wood (The new Pirates of the Electromagnetic Waves).
* John Carter (The new Land/locked bodies) (poetry).
Anyone wanting to write in this retrocultural sub-genre would also likely need to read William Least-heat Moon’s Prairyerth a couple of times. Probably also Guy Davenport’s Eclogues. H.P. Lovecraft’s many letters detailing his 1920s and 30s summer travels could even be of use, and see also his Collected Essays, Volume 4: Travel (but skip Quebec).
Screen touchstones might be series 2-5 of Northern Exposure, Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, and probably others I’ve forgotten or not seen yet (I vaguely recall a sub-sub genre which involves farmers standing in corn-fields waiting for the aliens). If writing for children one would also want to look at the more sci-fi -ish end of the raft of small-town screen adventures, from Explorers (1985) through the animated The Iron Giant (1999), to the more recent first series of Stranger Things and both series of Gravity Falls. Probably also the various Spielberg movies that riff on the theme, if not already seen, and Spielberg-a-like graphic novels such as Paper Girls. (There also seem to be many fantasy works in that sort of setting, from the classic The Giant Under the Snow to Spiderwick, and doubtless a great many more by now).
There is of course another gloomier and grimmer post-apocalyptic rural science fiction sub-genre, in which an authoritarian regime and/or dark religion has come to dominate the surviving pastoral people. In some cases it is a smothering ennui, rather than a brutal authoritarianism, that has overtaken the nature-reclaimed future-Earth — from Wells’s The Time Machine to Walter Trevis’s Mockingbird. Sometimes the people are no longer present and have all mysteriously and suddenly vanished, as in Everyone’s Gone to the Rapture, and the world is observed by a lone walker or computer while Not Much Happens in an eerier and eerier manner. The latter two forms swing back toward Simak a little, re: his Cemetery World and “The Street That Wasn’t There”.
