The Visitors

Written by Clifford D. Simak

Narrated by Gary Noon

An enormous, mysterious box descends upon small-town Minnesota, spelling trouble for the world, in this classic adventure from a Science Fiction Grand Master.



Forestry student Jerry Conklin is fly-fishing when something huge lands on his car, crushing it into the earth. It looks like a big black box—about fifty feet high and two hundred feet long—and the object stirs up quite a commotion among the townspeople of Lone Pine, Minnesota. One of them even shoots at it—and quickly pays for it with his life.



Around the country, people scramble to determine what exactly the box is. Is it a machine? Or maybe a sentient being? What does it want? They have no way of knowing.



Jerry, meanwhile, has firsthand knowledge after the visitor abducts him. Then, just as he discovers it is a living, intelligent creature, it releases him into the darkness of night.



As Jerry searches for a way back to civilization, more visitors descend upon Earth. They seem harmless enough. Then they begin eating trees, and that's only the beginning . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Sep 10, 2024
• ISBN: 9798855574425

Clifford D. Simak

During his fifty-five-year career, CLIFFORD D. SIMAK produced some of the most iconic science fiction stories ever written. Born in 1904 on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin, Simak got a job at a small-town newspaper in 1929 and eventually became news editor of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, writing fiction in his spare time. Simak was best known for the book City, a reaction to the horrors of World War II, and for his novel Way Station. In 1953 City was awarded the International Fantasy Award, and in following years, Simak won three Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award. In 1977 he became the third Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and before his death in 1988, he was named one of three inaugural winners of the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Reviews for The Visitors

[catseyegreen · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A giant black oblong object lands in a small town in Minnesota. The people are excited and the government is agitated but the object is unresponsive to all attempts to communicate.
This story is a nostalgic look back at an era when newspapers were still a primary source of news and pay phones were on every corner. This plot would have to go completely differently in our modern era when everyone in the town would be taking photos and posting to social media.
Unfortunately the story comes to an incomplete end. It is almost as if the author reached his word count and stopped there. Unsatisfying.

[cheryl_in_cc_nv · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hm.  Interesting ideas, of course, as it's Simak.  Characterization, esp. of women, slightly better than many of his previous works (but that's not saying much, I have to admit).  How much you like this depends on how much you're interested in different people's pragmatic reactions to the appearance of this evidence of alien life.  The President wants to be re-elected.  The manager of the newspaper wants scoops, and the editor wants to fulfill the mission of 'information for the people's good.'  Citizens are variously terrified, welcoming, hostile, annoyed, and even bemused.  And by the end when it just ends, with not much of anything actually having happened, with no solid information about what's next, the reader is likely to be both bemused and confused.  I thought I'd figured it out, but then I read Grant's review on GR and he has a quite different interpretation....  I really like that this alien is nothing like the 'human with wrinkly forehead' that we usually get.  I also like that there are no villains.*  

What is driving these people to urge a day of prayer is the obsessive urge of the suddenly devout to force everyone else into at least a simulation of their state of mind."  (That's the press sec. of the Pres. opining. It's a very minor bit, but I think it's a good sample.)

*Come to think of it, that may be why I like all of Simak so much, why I keep reading him even though he doesn't have the most talent.  His stories are about ideas, about people trying to figure something out, not about good vs. evil.)

"

[johngrant1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I picked this up at a Worldcon a few years back. Time was, I thought there could never be such a thing as a boring Simak novel, even though some of the later books of his I'd read had been a bit, well, lacking in sustenance. Sadly, The Visitors proved to be dull as ditchwater. The aliens arrive in the form of lots of big, featureless black boxes that arrive in forest areas and start devouring trees. One does so on the outskirts of Lone Pine, Minnesota, and Simak's usual roster of small-town characters start trying to make contact with it, or at least to cope with its presence. Oh how I longed for the days of The Big Back Yard or They Walked Like Men . . .