Blue Six

Rather than being “The Best Of.....” this is a collection of ten short stories ranging from 1939 to 1971 and as the author readily admits in his rather modest introduction the first two are not in the same league as some of his later work.

The full listing in my 1975 Sphere paperback are:

1939: Madness from Mars
1940: Sunspot Purge
1958: The Sitters
1959: A Death in the House
1960: Final Gentleman
1961: Shotgun Cure
1963: Day of Truce
1965: Small Deer
1970: The Thing in the Stone
1971: The Autumn Land
Bibliography

This is a great collection and a good introduction to Simak's work, I would recommend this to anyone interested in discovering one of the more significant Science Fiction authors of the last century.

To be honest I think Dean Koontz is wrong, I found this book both cleverer and more riveting than Dracula, the fact that the antagonists are vampires is almost irrelevant, they could just as easily be zombies, werewolves or hells angels.
The most important aspect is how and indeed why the last human continues to survive against the odds.
It is one of the best post apocalypse novels ever written but unlike many of them it’s fairly short and hasn’t been dragged out to no great effect out the way some authors feel compelled to do.
Also forget about the various film adaptations you may have seen, they are all good in their own way but none of them do justice to this book.

This is a strange and enigmatic story as if an episode of the prisoner had been written by Franz Kafka, if you like your fiction somewhat left field track this one down.