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James Goodall
Features Writer
1:00 AM 15th January 2025
arts

‘Where There Are No Men, There Cannot Be Motives Accessible To Men’*. Clifford D. Simak’s The Visitors

I discovered Clifford D. Simak’s The Visitors while browsing classic sci-fi art on Twitter/X. They say you should never judge a book by its cover, lest you discard a potential classic in error. An uninspiring dust jacket won’t always reflect the quality of the pages within; conversely, a jazzy sleeve won’t guarantee a literary masterpiece. Intrigued, I decided to seek out a copy.

It was Martin Hoffman’s cover art that drew my attention – a forest scene with an intimidating black shape descending from the sky. Naturally, I presumed The Visitors would be an alien invasion story in the same vein as Independence Day. Just what I was in the mood for!

Of course, I judged the book by its cover and set my expectations high, but I hoped The Visitors might be a forgotten gem.

The action takes place in Lone Pine, Minnesota. One day, the visitors drift into the neighbourhood and alarm the townspeople. They don’t make contact, keep to themselves, and appear non-hostile. Their intentions aren’t clear, and they seem content for a time to loiter and window-shop.

But the situation soon becomes inflamed. Beating Chekhov’s gun principle to the punch, the town barber takes a potshot at one of the shapes, and the visitors promptly vaporise him for his efforts.

News travels, and worldwide panic quickly ensues. The media becomes rife with speculation. Scientists and the military attempt to make contact but fail; their experiments prove inconclusive, yet they persevere in vain.

...the town barber takes a potshot at one of the shapes, and the visitors promptly vaporise him for his efforts...
Meanwhile, the visitors conduct their own analyses. They abduct a resident of Lone Pine and take him into one of their craft, where they study him alongside other biological samples. But the character, Jerry, doesn’t enjoy a Close Encounters of the Third Kind moment. Mid-journey, the visitors jettison him somewhat unceremoniously into a tree.

The visitors choose to be beneficent, however, and contribute valuable resources. Over time, these offerings become more complex, ranging from motor cars that can fly to top-of-the-range housing units. However, things turn sinister. Some of these accommodations already contain occupants! The story finishes on this cliffhanger.

The Visitors is somewhat uneventful as far as alien invasion stories go. If anything, the aliens are indifferent to humanity and spend much of their time ingesting trees to produce cellulose – an essential requirement for their reproductive processes. We later learn that the visitors are a dying race searching for new resources. It was never a mission of genocide – quite the opposite. Rather than attempting to engineer man’s destruction, the visitors are striving to prevent their own. As a result, the story has more in common with The Man Who Fell to Earth than Mars Attacks! The story premise also mirrors that of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home; only Simak’s probe-like entities share a kinship with trees rather than whales. Consequently, we don’t see much of what we’d expect from a typical alien invasion piece. There are none of the usual tropes – no flying saucers razing monuments and notable landmarks, to the ground.

To its detriment, the story focuses chiefly on the minutiae and inner workings of a newsroom reporting on the invasion. This makes sense to a degree, Simak himself being a former journalist for the Minneapolis Star. They say to write about what you know, after all. But this can double as a poisoned chalice for the reader if misplayed. Simak takes this rule of thumb to an extreme in The Visitors. At times, it felt like I was watching All the President’s Men – no bad thing in itself. But on this occasion, I wanted aliens, not newspaper men! Others have fallen into this same trap, of course. John Marks’ Fangland, a 2007 reworking of Dracula, makes a similar misstep, prioritising reporters over vampires.

But at no point did I find The Visitors a plodding or unengaging read. Despite the fact very little happens in terms of plot development, Simak kept me hooked. Another War of the Worlds this isn’t. But it helped wile away many a cold, dark January evening at my local pub. What The Visitors lacks in terms of dramatic tension, it makes up for with good storytelling.

At times, it felt like I was watching All the President’s Men – no bad thing in itself. But on this occasion, I wanted aliens, not newspaper men!
One element that works particularly well is the story’s subtle use of allegory. The people of Lone Pine object to the invasion by the visitors. At the same time, plans are afoot to take over a neighbouring Native American reservation. The townspeople don’t consider the implications of this or the glaring double standard at play. In this way, Simak critiques the colonialist mindset on a larger scale. The people of Lone Pine aim to displace a native population, while the visitors represent more technologically advanced colonisers. Simak skilfully draws this parallel throughout the narrative.

The Visitors is an odd one, to say the least. It’s not a schlocky 1950s-style blow-up-the-White-House-with-ray-guns piece. Nor is it a cerebral first contact piece like Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life (filmed in 2016 as Arrival). Occupying a perfectly agreeable middle ground, the book doesn’t set the world alight. Nor does it have to. It is what it is – a perfectly serviceable pulp sci-fi story.



The Visitors is published by Ballantine Books.

*From Solaris by Stanislav Lem (1961).