Hello {{first_name | Reader}},
Happy Summer Solstice! I’ve just posted a new Low Visibility Ahead entry, “A Second Look at Failure.”
“I’ve been struggling to write about the U.S. Forest Service for three weeks now, and I’ve given it up as a bad idea….I studied Franz Kafka’s novels and short stories in college and learned that bureaucracies, no matter how well-conceived and well-meaning, eventually turn the human spirit to sludge. They don’t tell great stories, in the end, and if you write about them, neither do you….”
You can read the rest on my website at johnrember.com/blog/a-second-look-at-failure.
Reading in Stanley
I’ll be reading from my Journal of the Plague Years books at the Stanley Library on Tuesday, July 7 at 5:00 p.m. Stop by if you’re in the area. Books will be available for purchase, and I’ll even sign them for you.
Journal of the Plague Years Wins Award
I was pleased to learn last week that Journal of the Plague Years: End Notes was awarded the Silver Medal in the Essays category of the 2026 Independent Publisher Book Awards.
This is the 30th anniversary of the IPPY Awards celebrating the best independently published titles from around the globe: “Our mission is to shine a spotlight on the thousands of outstanding independent, university, and self-published books that hit the shelves each year.”
I’m honored to have been recognized.
Recommended Reading
Another book that changed my life: City, by Clifford D. Simak. It’s a novel-in-stories published in 1952. I first read it ten years later, when I was twelve. I’ve read it four or five times since, most recently when I couldn’t resist purchasing a Kindle collection of Simak's works (100 Novels and Short Stories, 3,738 pages, 99 cents). I’m not recommending the collection because it contains some truly terrible stories written for the pulps at the start of Simak’s career. It took him a while to find his true subject, but when he did he was brilliant at it.
City is about dogs, if dogs could talk. It reveals that dogs are far smarter than we think they are, and more ethical, loyal, loving, kind, and aware than humans ever thought of being. He sets their stories in a future that extends for tens of thousands of years, on an Earth that no longer contains humans because we’ve left for other stars. He gives us robots that remember the days before humans abandoned their home to become a minor race in the galaxy, one scorned by superior races, but still loved by the dogs.
City is also about time, and Simak postulates a universe where there is only a perpetual present. Go back one second in the past and you’re in a different world, a second before that in a different one yet.
Simak has been characterized as a writer of pastoral science fiction, which isn’t exactly a burgeoning genre, but he fills it well. His worlds are gentle places, filled with the sadness of human failure (Simak is on record as saying that he liked losers) and the dilemmas of humans and robots that find themselves living too long and remembering too much.
The book made me decide not to live forever. One life was good and long enough. At twelve, that was a choice—or at least I thought it was—and knowing what I know now, I’m glad I made the decision I did.
Anyway, City shows us what can happen when a writer finds something so much greater than himself in his writing that the rest of his life lies in its fulfillment. We should all be so lucky.
Climate report: The valley is cool and green and clear-aired this spring, and Julie and I and Juno are getting out for hikes. Wildflowers are in full bloom and deer and antelope are on the hillsides. It’s a beautiful, pastoral world, one that for this moment, at least, makes Clifford D. Simak look like a realist.
