THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #57: A review of "Founding Father" by Clifford D. Simak

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Pelan’s got a good record of picking SF stories for this anthology and successfully arguing for them as horror stories. Here, we have another example. Sadly, he fails this time.



Winston-Kirby is one of the immortals of Earth, but he is far from home. He has spent the last century onboard a starship headed for the depths of uncharted space. Why? Because in the future, humans use immortals to help seed the galaxy. Since they live forever, they have no problem spending a significant time getting to another planet, no matter how long it takes to get there. Once they show up, they incubate ready-for-life embryos. Soon, the new people are born, and the immortal raises them to be ready to live out their lives on their new planet. When they’ve reached the point of being able to survive on their own, the immortal moves on and does it all over again somewhere else.


Sounds like kind of a dull lifestyle, no? Luckily, he has a few companions who share a lot of his interests. They have many scintillating conversations to while away the years, and they never even have a single quarrel in all of that time. Except . . . .


SPOILER ALERT: If this can even be called a spoiler alert, that is. In the middle of the story, we learn that his companions don’t exist, that he created them so he could get through this century without going crazy (not realizing, of course, that the very thought is actually pretty crazy). A neat twist, but it doesn’t happen at the end, like it should have. In fact, everything after this moment in the story is kind of blah as it winds down to a ho-hum ending. END OF SPOILERS.


That’s not the only glaring flaw. Simak spends a lot of the story explaining the situation to the readers, rather than letting these things be revealed by the story itself. For SF, that’s pretty weak. As a result, it’s really hard to care about anything that happens here, and we certainly don’t give a fuck about Winston-Kirby. It’s a cool concept, but it feels more like a scene in a bigger novel than a stand-alone tale. Another rare story in this collection that should be passed over.


[This story first appeared in GALAXY and cannot be read online at this time.]