The Big Front Yard
Encyclopedia
The Big Front Yard is a science fiction short story by Clifford D. Simak
which won a 1959 Hugo Award for Best Novelette
.
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. The story ends with the arrival of the natives of the desert planet, who are eager to trade ideas with the new member of the universal "planet-network".
Clifford D. Simak
Clifford Donald Simak was an American science fiction writer. He was honored by fans with three Hugo awards and by colleagues with one Nebula award and was named the third Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1977.-Biography:Clifford Donald Simak was born in...
which won a 1959 Hugo Award for Best Novelette
Hugo Award for Best Novelette
The Hugo Awards are given every year by the World Science Fiction Society for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year. The award is named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the pioneering science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, and was once officially...
.
Summary
The story is about the conversion of an ordinary house into an interplanetary portalInterstellar teleporter
An interstellar teleporter is a hypothetical technology appearing in science fiction, typically in hard sci-fi, which teleports people and/or other objects over interstellar distances instantaneously...
or stargate
Stargate (device)
A Stargate is a portal device within the Stargate fictional universe that allows practical, rapid travel between two distant locations. The devices first appear in the 1994 Roland Emmerich film Stargate, and thereafter in the television series Stargate SG-1 and its spin-offs...
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. The story ends with the arrival of the natives of the desert planet, who are eager to trade ideas with the new member of the universal "planet-network".