Friday, September 25, 2026

Clifford Simak Mastodonia

The Beatles' Taxman was a response to the their encounter with British tax law once they started making real money. 

Mastodonia is a time travel story where an important subplot is that the money they Stef going to make from time travel will be exempt from the IRS because they will set up operations in 150,000 BC North America where the U.S. lacks jurisdiction. Did Simak suddenly start making as the saying goes, "real money"?

It is, even ignoring the cynical question about tax avoidance, an intriguing story of an archeologist who goes looking for a crashed spacecraft and runs into an ancient stranded astronaut who is immortal and can construct "time roads" into Earth's past. Pleistocene, Miocene, Jurassic.

Subplot involve giving poor ghetto dwellers a frontier with no resource limits, safaris to hunt dinosaurs, Hollywood goes to make movies, religious fanatics attempting to get a monopoly on travels to Crucifixion time. Lots of interesting ideas and a love story.

1 comment:

  1. Robert Silverburg (author of "The Time of the Great Freeze") put a mention in his novelette, "The Time Hoppers" about when the government got hold of the time travel process, it wound up sending the "Proles" back in time far enough to where they all were apparently eaten by tigers. If Simak's ghetto dwellers were sent back with the skills they possessed in the current time period, the effect would be the same as in Silverberg's book, but more tactfully introduced.

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