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The Big Front Yard

Field	Value
italic title	no
name	The Big Front Yard
image	[[File:The Big Front Yard.jpg	220px]]
caption	Illustrator Frank Kelly Freas
author	Clifford D. Simak
country	United States
language	English
genre	Science fiction novella
published_in	Astounding Science Fiction
publication_type	Periodical
publisher	Street & Smith
media_type	Print (Magazine paperback)
award	Hugo Award for Best Novelette (1959)
pub_date	October 1958
pages	44

"The Big Front Yard" is a science fiction novella by American writer Clifford D. Simak which won a 1959 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. It was also included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two (1973) after being voted one of the best novellas up to 1965.

Plot summary

The story is about the conversion of an ordinary house into an interplanetary portal or stargate by mysterious alien beings who apparently have taken up the task of exploring space for habitable planets and connecting them to each other, thus allowing civilizations to swap ideas easily.

In the story, a tinkerer and trader, Hiram Taine, finds out that his house contains peculiar creatures who repair and upgrade things in interesting ways and transform parts of his house to a substance impervious to harm. After unearthing a spaceship buried in the backyard, he discovers that the front part of his house is no longer on Earth but on a strange desert planet which is now accessible by merely passing through the front door. A little exploration in the desert reveals the existence of another similar house which opens to a rainy planet and some spaceships identical to the one unearthed in the backyard sitting in launch cradles next to some other empty launch cradles, implying several other similar houses. The story ends with the arrival of some aliens of either the desert planet or one of those connected to it, who are eager to trade ideas with the new member of the universal "planet-network".

Publication history

Since its original publication in Astounding Science Fiction, "The Big Front Yard" has not been re-published in any other magazine, apart from the January, 1959 British version of Astounding.

The story has been anthologized at least ten times, including Italian and German translations. The story also appears in at least seven collections devoted to Simak's work, including French and German translations (for the latter, the story was titled "Das Tor zur anderen Welt" ("The Gateway to the Other World")).

More detail on the story's publication history can be found at its listing in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (for which see the External Links section below).

References

"1959 Hugo Awards". World Science Fiction Society.
"Introduction", Ben Bova, ''The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two'', New York: Doubleday, 1973, pp. ix–xi. Identical in volumes Two A and Two B.
"Publication: Astounding Science Fiction, January 1959 (UK)".

Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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