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Study 168 - Founding Father (Patreon)

Published:
2026-06-04 18:06:47
Edited:
2026-06-04 22:34:52
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

A space traveler wrestles with the need for human companionship... and LOSES! Join us as we discuss the pastoral sci-fi story Founding Father by Clifford D. Simak!

Special thanks to reader Jason Compton! You can also catch him on This Week in Retro as well as The Retro Adventurers!

Check out this interview with Simak from the 1971 World Science Fiction Convention in Boston!

Our past Clifford Simak shows: Desertion and The Street That Wasn't There

Up next: The Mainz Psalter by Jean Ray

Comments

Science Doctor, PhD

[Commenting before listening to the episode] I really appreciate when stories about common concepts (in this case a blend of "the curse of immortality" and "spaaaace... maaadnesss!") are done in a different way, particularly for and older story. Like, okay, a common trope of immortality is "Oh woe is me, I have to watch my family and friends die, and all I get for it is to be young and vibrant forever!" And sure, that would suck, but I mean, regularly people often have to watch friends/family die and don't get to be hot and young forever as a perk. By comparison, I once read a story where the issue was "running out of space" in one's brain, which ultimately drove the immortals crazy as their thoughts became fragmented. In this case, the space madness elements, not ending with "And then he went crazy, because of loneliness, and did something bad!" but rather exploring how we can lie to ourselves to compensate for such feelings.

Science Doctor, PhD

[Commenting before reading... Erm... Again] d Weirdly, this also made me think of other, in this case "lower case 'd', delusions that we can be aware of but cannot escape. For example, given the podcast format, "parasocial relationships." I have been listening to this show for decades at this point, and because I'm particularly cool, I often re-listen to episodes while driving, doing chores, or the more mundane aspects of my job. It's like white noise, but with more Dracula jokes. So, at some point, it feels like I "know" Chris & Chad. But, regardless of how much of them is in these shows, I do not know either of them; we've never met. I'm aware that this feeling is a parasocial relationship, but I cannot turn it off, and it's sort of odd to experience that. One can only imagine the more intense version of those feelings with more profound or dangerous delusions, like the one in this story.

S Jayne Bradley

This episode made me think of third man syndrome. It's the phenomenon that occurs when explorers or people alone in extreme situations feel like there is another person with them, either guiding or comforting them. It is unsurprising winston, stuck alone for a long time, would begin to imagine someone with him. He is lucky he already knows the people he will be imagining. No matter how you spin it, people are social creatures and they do need other people to keep them sane. Sometimes its the illusion of the perfect group of philosophers and sometimes it's the hologram of your dead bunkmate, and the creature that evolved from the ships cat.

Chris Fiebelkorn

18 years! My wife and I have only been together 15- she thinks the podcast came first, and honestly she’s not wrong!

Newk

You reference the matrix a couple times but listening to those as soon as he said embryo it made me think of the Alien movie Prometheus

It's a Ghost.

This was absolutely fantastic! After reading "Desertion" by Simak (which you covered previously) and now "Founding Father," I think I might need to check out more of his stories!

Leprejuan

Not trying to start any trouble, but James Holloway of Monster Man is investigating a weird lag in his Patreon feeds. If it matters to you at all, I received the email that there's a new SS of SS show 11:07 pacific time in my email, but the show popped up in my feed 16:38. I have always just accepted the delay, but in case anyone complains...

Wulf Mungus

It's pronounced "Simak", not "Simak"

Jb Lee

I retired almost three years ago and I sure thought about that BEFORE you guys made the comparison. But I have things to do. Surely Winston will find something to occupy his time. I imagine these new humans growing up and realizing there are 9,000,000 whittled carvings of penguins all around them... Read Simak's GOOD NIGHT, MR. JAMES. Or THE BIG FRONT YARD. Boy, talk about the antipodes...

Ko-Wahi Kit

Our brains are incredibly elastic. I may have told this story in another comment and if so forgive me, but my experience with VR made this tale feel eerily familiar. In college my game dev club bought an oculus rift. One of the best games ported to VR is called Superhot. You play as a John Wick-style badass fighting your way through dozens of low poly enemies. This is accomplished by simply making time move only when you do. So if a bullet speeds towards your head and you freeze, so does the bullet. Every frenetic combat scene becomes a puzzle of thrown objects, carefully aimed shots, and dexterously placed knife jabs. After a short time you’re chucking a bottle at the guy behind you, grabbing the pistol of the one about to stab you, dispatching his friend with the machine gun and just in time turning back to punch knife guy in the face. Then you wave your hand idly; pushing time and the bottle along to crack the skull of the first sucker and all three drop in unison. I played this game for 45 minutes. That’s all it took for my lizard brain to believe I had time powers. A friend interrupted me to go get a snack from the lounge. We matched pace. I slowed my pace, he slowed. I unconsciously sped up…so did he. It seemed as we talked that his speech slowed and sped ever so slightly to match. My brain had 22 years of evidence to build off and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was controlling our pace through the halls with time control powers I hadn’t possessed 45 minutes ago. The closest thing I can describe it to is that feeling of motion you get after you finally lay on your hotel bed after a long road trip. Your body remembers the acceleration. It’s forgotten what being still is like. The Oculus Rift is essentially a cellphone strapped to your face, some fancy lenses, and motion/finger tracking controllers. That was enough to give me a sense of immersion deep enough that my brain was trained to cherry pick evidence for it afterwards. It only lasted maybe 15 minutes, and as I used VR I got less and less affected. My brain learned you have magic powers in the stuffy helmet world, and don’t in the real one. Still I can easily imagine a machine that can back up illusions with sensory data could train a human brain into fooling itself. It might not even take 100 years.

Ko-Wahi Kit

Goofy side note: I petition for Chad’s, “it’s on both sites…ya see.” sound bite to be a permanent edition to the end of episodes going forward.

Our old pal Brendan Gardiner

Following the episode in April covering Shirley Jackson’s “The Beautiful Stranger,” Eric (Speaker in Digressions) brought up the remarkable case of the 16th century French imposter who assumed the identity of a certain man, Michael Guerre, and presented himself as such to the village from which Guerre had disappeared nine years prior. The imposter was accepted by all, including Guerre’s wife. I recently watched the movie from the early 80s covering these events, which Eric S.i.D. mentioned and which is free on YouTube and well worth a watch, and then I got very interested in the case and read more on it. Someone giving commentary about how this matter played out in the courts – the imposter was found guilty and hanged – brought up the idea of true versus good, which is germane here given that almost all in the village agreed that this man was a vast improvement on the actual Michael Guerre, and brought happiness to the community. Did it serve an ultimate good for him to be executed? The law as written says yes, as it pursues truth as an end and demands a certain outcome. But the law needs to contain within itself outlets for exception to the law, or it fails. This is where clemency and broad latitude in sentencing come into play, for those times when contingencies are present which the crafters of the laws could not anticipate. If the law only serves what is true and allows no room for an exercise of judgement that ends up blunting the application of the law in the name of what’s good, it fails. Just so with the situation in this story where you need a human being to, as you say, improvise and correct problems that were not foreseen. The judgment calls he will make that lead to deviations from the plan are the clemency within the sort of law, so to speak, by which the advanced robots operate. This person can provide a continuity of messy human existence in a way that the machines cannot. I wrote and re-wrote that last sentence 10 times because it kept sounding like some bland platitude at the end of a Facebook post cobbled together by AI with information scraped off the Internet. Maybe it still does! Great episode.

Matt Shank

Really thoughtful episode. I always like it when the subject matter dives deep. I can provide at least some anecdotal experience about constructing your reality after rejecting the one you were raised in. I am someone who has both left the religion I was raised in and as a result voluntarily distanced myself from much of my family. For me, the end result was essentially deconstructing my entire personality and worldview. Having realized what I had been taught about right and wrong and how the world works wasn't true caused me to question EVERYTHING. I spent years rebuilding my beliefs from scratch. It was hard. Lonely. I struggled (and still do) with depression and anxiety. However, the satisfaction of becoming the person you want to be, a person who understands where they stand and what they think and why, its an experience I wouldn't trade for anything. There is a deep power in truly knowing yourself, and I don't know if I would have found that if I hadn't been forced to take off all the pieces of me that were layered on without my knowledge or consent. I know I am still affected by my upbringing in a million unnoticeable ways everyday, but I also know I'm living the "realest" life I can. I can't do it any way else now.

Fraser Burnett

That University of Kansas clip was better than the new Boards of Canada album.

witchhousemedia

No trouble and thanks! Patreon changed a default setting which caused this to happen to lots of folks but we figured it out. MUCH APPRECIATED!

Joe Webb

I've always loved Simak. I first read him in a collection of Hugo award winning stories - The Big Front Yard, 1959. A gentle, pastoral story with compelling themes. Honestly I can't think of what happened in it much, but the way it happened has stuck with me as a pleasant memory. I'd recommend this one, or the novel Cemetery World, with far future Earth remade into the graveyard. Its fun, with a philosophical warbot, an artist and ghostly beings, again in that rural, gentle story telling that just lingers. In Founding Father, I feel like the protagonist represents God. A man, who was supposed to nurture the first population of clone babies. And of all life, not just humans? Why not a woman, a mother? (OK, somewhat sexist, but we allow that for stories of the time otherwise). He's immortal, and he has lounged in a wonderful situation for a long time, essentially Heaven, until there work to do. Now he must face the grim, stark, spartan reality of creating a world - to me that sounds like the strict, grim Abrahamic religious traditions. Not the harshness those traditions can demonstrate, but at least an explorations of why those traditions are there. How God can represent the everyman, the pastoralist, and the mid-century guy that has a drink and some conversation in the evening after a nice dinner, even as he is immortal, in charge of creating, and caring for, an entire world.

Peter Gabancho

Eighteen years!!! It fits. I was turned on to your podcast shortly after my son was born and he leaves for college at the end of the summer. Thank you for the time, the memories, and helping me discover all sorts of great writers.

Jaemin Jang

I think the more realistic, less idyllic case studies of people living and working in remote areas and in close quarters are that of scientists conducting arctic research. In 2018, Russian scientific engineer Sergey Savitsky, 55, stabbed Oleg Beloguzov, 52, a welder at the Bellinghausen research center on King George island because Savitsky “was fed up with the man telling him the endings of books.” Beloguzov reportedly gave up the endings of books Savitsky checked out of the station's library. To borrow the words of Dr. Manhattan: "Without condoning... or condemning. I understand." (Spoilers ahead!) This story likewise calls to mind the 2016 movie Passengers where Chris Pratt’s character wakes up Jennifer Lawrence’s character, presumably condemning her to space isolation and death with him. The movie is bafflingly categorized under sci-fi “romance” when the premise is nothing short of a Stockholm Syndrome horror (but then again, there are people who walked away from The Obsession thinking Bear was the victim).

Pearce Duncan

Fellini made a really great short film adaptation of "Never Bet the Devil Your Head" called "Toby Dammit," which amps up the horror content considerably. It's the only good part of the portmanteau film "Spirits of the Dead," which is kind of an arthouse version of the Corman Poe movies. It's worth skipping through the first two stories to get straight to Fellini's one, which also pays homage to his friend, the horror director Mario Bava. I saw the film first and was surprised when I read the original story to find that it's straight comedy.

Pagurus

Of course the robot bringing the bad news is called "Job" - the character that had everything taken from him by satan to test his faith.

David Halstead

I watched the Backrooms movie and it had more psychological and philosophical aspects than I was expecting. It had me thinking about a lot of the things you talk about in this episode. A good movie overall, and amazing that someone so young made it.

Jim Cannon

Hit the Alien bonus episode y'all did for the 40th anniversary in my current re-listen, and Simak came up organically. Funny, because the whole time you discussed this story, all I could think of was hypersleep.