The Goblin Reservation
Clifford D. Simak's Neglected Galaxy Award-Winning Gem
Simak conflates time travel to the Jurassic era, Trolls, Goblins, Dinosaurs, Neanderthals, sabre-toothed cats and William Shakespeare's Ghost in a quietly anarchic way.
Clifford D. Simak's The Goblin Reservation (192pp, ISBN 978-0881848977) was first serialized in Galaxy in 1968, and won the only award bestowed by the magazine's readers. Despite being a contender for the 1969 Hugo Award, voted for by the attendees of the World Science-Fiction Convention, it has sadly been out of print these last fifteen years.
Clifford D. Simak
In The Goblin Reservation, travel by matter-transmission in the 25th century onwards is common-place, and accidents are almost unheard of. But when Peter Maxwell returns from an unexpected diversion to an unknown planet, he learns that he -or rather his duplicate- died a little while earlier.
Maxwell works for the College of Supernatural Phenomena in Wisconsin. By this time Earth has become one vast university planet for the galaxy, with vast areas areas of wilderness allocated to creatures that were thought to be myth, but which have been discovered -as a result of time travel- to exist.
So Neanderthals rub shoulders with goblins, the ghost of William Shakespeare (who, it's discovered didn't actually write the plays) meets a sabre-toothed cat who belongs to a beautiful woman, and extra-terrestrials called Wheelers make Maxwell an offer he can't refuse.
At first sight, The Goblin Reservation seems to be an anarchic stew of different ideas, but this isn't the case. To understand it, it's necessary to detour a little into the history of SF & fantasy, those often uneasy bedfellows.
Fantasy and Science Fiction
From the 1940s onwards, fantasy was regularly pronounced dead by science-fiction writers and publishers, and sales figures seemed to support this. Writers who wanted to write fantasy usually needed to find a semi-plausible rationale, such as calling magic by technical terms like tele-kinesis, and inventing reasons such as it originating in 'unknown' parts of the brain.
This gradually changed with the publication of Ace Books' 'bootleg' imprint of Tolkein's Lord of the Rings in the mid-1960s, but by the time Simak wrote The Goblin Reservation in 1966-1967, the bias against fantasy was still strong.
Time Travel to the Jurassic EraSimak was a rationalist, but there are signs, both with the characterization, which is at times hilarious, and with his materials, that he was in a playful mood when he wrote this book, one which reflects the anarchic and experimental times.
There's little doubt that naming the greedy, steak-thieving, affectionate sabre-tooth Sylvester is a nod to cartoons popular at the time. O'Toole the goblin has an orotund way of talking reminiscent of John Ford's The Quiet Man, and his feud with the trolls is at pure Hollywood-Ireland. Alley-Oop the Neanderthal is drawn as a rustic who wants only to guzzle moonshine. All the characterization is affectionate, including the cowardly ghost, even the villainous Wheelers, who are based on Stink-bugs.
Only the aliens and time-travel to the Jurassic Era, marks this out as being SF, rather than comedy-fantasy.
Pastoral Science-Fiction
Nonetheless, apart from abandoning his beloved dogs (canines crop up in most of Simak's novels) for a cat, there are certain aspects that mark this out as a Simak; there is his frequent fascination with time-travel and dinosaurs; there is the elegaic quality of the writing, when Simak turns serious. Above all, there is this most pastoral of SF writer's obvious love for the Wisconsin landscape.
The Goblin Reservation is a wonderful, unfairly neglected book. That should change.
