Scarcity and abundance: Ring Around the Sun (1953) by Clifford D. Simak

A tall tale of impossible products, mutants, and parallel Earths

Rapacious capitalism exploits our world, plundering its limited resources. The resulting wealth is then distributed in incredibly unequal ways, with disastrous consequences for human beings. This system is so obviously broken that its proponents can do little more than to continually rebrand it. One example is the so-called “abundance agenda”, which rules out radical change in favour of technocratic tinkering. Its pursuit of “supply-side progressivism” ignores our planet’s ecological limits, and deploys fanciful ideas right out of science fiction, like drug factories in low-earth orbit. 

But what if true abundance was available to us? What if instead of one Earth, with its troublesome limited resources, there were instead thousands or millions of untouched Earths just within reach? The US SF writer Clifford D. Simak imagined just this scenario in his novel Ring Around the Sun (1953). In this playful, fast-paced tall tale, the emergence of seemingly impossible new products is a clue to the discovery of many parallel universes, each with their own untouched, pristine Earth. 

As we know, capitalism is based not on abundance, but on scarcity. In Simak’s novel, the protagonist comes up against the powerful corporate interests threatened by discovery of the new Earths. Desperate to preserve their ability to profit, and to keep the masses under control, they will go to any lengths - even if it means provoking World War III.

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Clifford D. Simak and his pastoral SF

Clifford D. Simak (1904 - 1988) was a journalist and SF writer. He lived much of his life in Minneapolis, Minnesota where he worked for many years on the Minneapolis Star newspaper. However, much of his work is strongly connected with his origins in rural Wisconsin. Time and again in his long career, Simak returned to rural and pastoral settings, which are intruded upon by robots, aliens, and strange powers. As the SFE puts it, “he became sf's leading spokesman for rural, Midwestern values.” Simak’s dislike of cities and his love of rural “good neighbourliness” set him apart from other SF authors, and give his work a unique flavour - including in Ring Around the Sun.

Simak’s first short story was published in 1931, and his first novel followed in 1950. That year also saw the launch of Galaxy magazine, which quickly became a leader in the field and provided Simak with an important new market. Ring Around the Sun was first published over the course of the December 1952, January 1953, and February 1953 issues of Galaxy, and book publication followed later that year.

Outsourcing to another world

The novel is set in the future - in 1977 - and centres on Jay Vickers, a rather reclusive writer living in a small town in New York state. He has noticed, but is not particularly fazed by, a number of impressive new products. These include a razor which never wears out, and lightbulbs which last forever. Even more startling is the “forever car”, which never needs maintenance. Vickers attends a meeting, organised by his long-suffering literary agent, with a businessman representing powerful corporate interests. This titan of industry has realised what Vickers has not - that these new products, which have untraceable origins, threaten to totally undermine the whole economic system.

In one of the novel’s numerous audacious twists, Vickers later realises that he is in fact a mutant. With the symbolic aid of a spinning top he owned as a child, he can use his mind to transport himself into a parallel Earth. There are countless Earths, each separated in time by one second, their slightly different orbits causing them to form a “ring around the sun”. After an arduous journey, Vickers discovers an immense automated factory run by self-directing machines. This is the origin of the various forever products - but Vickers is yet to discover who is behind them, and what can be done to stop the devastating retaliation of a threatened capitalist system.

A seductive daydream

As Mike Ashley has written, “the idea that there may be another world alongside ours [...] has been a theme of fantasy for centuries”. He cites Gerald Grogan’s A Drop in Infinity (1915) as an important early treatment of the parallel world idea in SF. In Ring Around the Sun, Simak uses the idea of parallel worlds to tell what David Pringle called “a Tall Tale about the destruction of capitalism” rooted in “an implausible daydream”. 

Certainly the novel has an element of wish-fulfilment fantasy about it. The workers left unemployed by the forever products - which have destroyed the industries they worked in - are encouraged to become pioneer settlers in the alternate Earths. Their idyllic frontier lifestyle fits Simak’s view of the rural good life. The availability of apparently infinite free real estate on the other worlds allows humankind to sidestep ecological limits, like the so-called “discovery” of America replicated on an immensely larger scale. This is the ancient symbol of the cornucopia made manifest.

However, Ring Around the Sun also has darker aspects - chiefly related to the retaliation by big business. Through their sinister front organisation, corporations organise brutal crackdowns on mutants wherever they are found. The cheap, brilliant “forever car” becomes emblematic of the supposed threat to “civilisation” (i.e. corporate profit). Owners of these vehicles are assumed to be mutants and targeted for violent attack. This is an eerie inversion of today, where a very different, expensive, dangerous car has become a cultural flashpoint.

"A deeply felt work"

While David Pringle is arguably harsh to describe Simak’s prose as “simple to the point of banality”, he is arguably right to see the book as “too complicated for its own good.” Much of it comprises a series of dizzying twists and conceptual breakthroughs, which almost become overwhelming. Some readers may also find the climax and ending to be overly abrupt and convenient. At its best, though, Ring Around the Sun is a wonderfully imaginative and thought-provoking novel. Vickers’ discovery of the “factory world”, and its massive automated manufacturing complex, is surely one of the more striking episodes in early 1950s SF. 

While it is fantastical, Ring Around the Sun is also what Pringle calls “a deeply felt work” which explores the tension between abundance and scarcity. Simak’s thinking about what production and consumption are for, and what the good life should look like, remain relevant today in an increasingly fractious world in which resources are still distributed unequally.

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• I read the 1990 UK edition published by Mandarin. This was part of a large reissue programme of numerous works by Simak.
  
• In 1940, Isaac Asimov had published a short story (albeit with a very different theme) also called “Ring Around the Sun”.