City

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Summary: These are the tales that dogs tell....
Review: I still get choked up when I think of generation after generation of highly evolved dogs sitting around camp fires and debating over whether or not the mythical race of gods known as "man" ever really existed. Of course the same goes for the idea of robots carrying out man's dream of exploring the universe, as a sacred trust, long after men have ceased to be. And of course there is also the matter of the supreme sacrifice of man to ensure that his old companions will develop to their full potential- without human interference.

As much as I love Simak's _Waystation_ and _The Goblin Reservation_, this book is probably his masterpiece. It is certainly his most epic, covering so many millenia. I am so glad that Old Earth Books has put it back into print. Here are themes that he would expand in such works as _Ring Around the Sun_, _A Choice of Gods_, and _Special Deliverence_. This is good, because when you finish you definately are left wanting more.

I think that it was Heinlein that once said, "If you don't like Simak, then you don't like science fiction." I couldn't agree more.

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Summary: Enjoyable
Review: City is a fairly short book; but, for some reason, I found that it took me longer to read than many books twice its length... possibly because it involves so many different characters (the book is basically a collection of short stories which take place over a period of 10,000 years or so), that it demands more attention... and also possibly because it is more intellectual than dramatic.

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Summary: An ironic but compassionate sci-fi saga
Review: Clifford D. Simak's novel "City" sketches out the future history of the planet Earth: a future of genetically altered talking dogs, mutated humans, omnipresent robots, and other wonders. Simak uses a richly ironic structure to tell this vast saga. The novel is broken up into eight "tales," each of which is prefaced by a short note. Each of these eight notes is actually part of Simak's fiction. The commentary on the first tale, for example, refers to humankind as a "mythical race" which may have never actually existed.

Within this bold but witty structure, Simak deals with such themes as philosophy, phobia, history, legend, violence, culture, and evolution. The book is filled with memorable moments; one of my favorites is a poignant encounter between a genetically advanced talking dog and a primitive wolf. Simak's portrait of the ultimate fate of humanity is comparable to the work of Arthur C. Clarke in "Childhood's End." Throughout the book, Simak has a charming, enjoyable writing style. "City" is a book that, in my opinion, belongs in the canon of science fiction classics.

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Summary: When your dog gets his learn on
Review: It would probably be appropriate to start this review with a critique of the science involved in City. Simak's grasp of some concepts seems elementary for his time and later developments put to ridicule other aspects of the book. Some examples would be the colonies on Jupiter. It would be very difficult for the Lopers to crawl around on Jupiter, as it has no solid surface. Even placing cognitive abilities aside, the idea of dogs being able to speak human tongues goes against all we know about the evolution of language and the human language organ as described by Chomsky. In one of the tales, some humans are described as choosing to go into some type of stasis referred to as sleep. Now, even given the improbability of human hibernation for short periods, longer hibernations would feature characteristics irreconcilable with the preservation of corporeal integrity. Muscles wither without stimulation. Stimulation keeps hibernation from happening. Plus, think of the bedsores after several thousand years!!!!!!! A full dissection of the scientific flaws of this novel would certainly run almost the length of the work in question.
That being the case, how does a novel with physical flaws as its very base merit a five-star review? That is a fair question for anyone who hasn't read City. Those who have read it know the answer: the stories. City is composed of eight interconnected tales each introduced by an anthrop/cynologist. The tales as described by the canine narrator, begin with the downfall of the city as a viable community and extend through a doggish explanation, and attempt at debunking, the lack of historical artifacts as proof of the fabled race of man. The prose is solid throughout but the literary style is secondary to the development of Simak views of humanity and what it has to offer to the rest of the world.
Simak's substitution of a race that appears, by human standards anyway, to be more arbitrarily brutal than man as its replacement is surely suspect but it is merely a prop for his story. The tales comprising City were originally published separately as stories in pulps in the 1940's during and immediately after World War II before being collected in book form by Gnome Press in 1952. Simak's hope for a bettering of mankind after the dark time he witnessed it pass through is obvious throughout the works. The evolution of humans (and other animals) beyond killing is one of many noble ideas presented. The one morally questionable idea is the development of a slave race of intelligent robots. The enslavement of beasts of burden is certainly bad enough, but enslaving something that understands its servitude is surely worse. Characters in the novel achieve peaks of knowledge and understanding but are unable to show it to their fellow man. They are able to perform unique acts of medical expertise but cannot reason out agoraphobia enough to leave the house to bring about philosophical revolution. They show all the flaws of humanity and some of its talents as well.
What I found most interesting of all the ideas present, was the call for the complete changing of the guard for humanity. Severing all ties to the old cadre as a means of preventing their poisoning of the next generation is a neat concept. One loses all the benefits they provided but also shucked are prejudices, irrationalities, and codes/rhythms of behavior that produced them, outside of whatever among them are biologically induced anyway. All in all, I would call this book a great read and were it not for the publication of The Demolished Man in the same year, it surely would have been the inaugural recipient of the Hugo Award. It has an appreciable depth of imagination. It has a solid construction of sentence and flows wonderfully. It stimulates where many merely entertain

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Summary: Classic pastoral SF
Review: Simak does not write pulse-pounding, viscerally riveting, edge of your seat novels. Blood is rarely spilled in his books, blows are hardly struck, weapons are more often than not never seen. But to be perfectly honest, you don't miss it, because his novels don't require such things. Most of Simak's best work was written in the late fifties and sixties, when the Cold War was in full swing and everyone was afraid of being blowns to bits at any second. Simak, in his wisdom, looked to the future and not just to ten years from now, but many thousands of years and he wrote to reassure us, and himself, that while things right not might be tense and it might be tense for our children and maybe even our grandchildren, in time it will all become better and lead to something grand. "City" is probably the culmination of that ideal, telling a future history of not just mankind, but the earth itself and the creatures that in the end inherit it. The novel is told as a series of short stories, all linked by a framing device where the current residents of the earth (intelligent dogs) debate whether these "legends" are truly real or simply the product of years of storytelling. Each story brings the timeline further down and we see man begin to leave the cities, then the world itself and eventually leave it in the care of the dogs and the intelligent robots that were once their servants (among other beings). Through it all Simak keeps a quiet, calm tone, which amazingly brings a sense of realism to a situation that could only be properly be described as fantastic. SF in the fifties tended to be a bit on the "goofy" side of things so it's a credit to Simak that not only can he make this at all believable but that he manages to make it oddly evocative and poetic, as Man passes the torch to the dogs and sort of bows gracefully off the world, barely leaving any memories of themselves behind. The result is a charming, thought-provoking Future History that relies more on quiet moments and the passing of time than on violence and bloodshed, while heralding back to the optimistic tendancies of older SF, a trait that has come back but with a more ironic slant to it. This novel feels honest and Simak effortlessly conveys his hopes for the future through the pages. Not in print anymore, but easily uncovered, it's worth seeking out for readers interested in the quiet, thinking type of SF that isn't quite as common as it used to be, and even back then, wasn't all that common.

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Summary: When Sci-Fi was still trying to find a niche
Review: Simak was one of those who helped it muscle in to the human consciousness.

If you've read the other reviews you'll have noticed a lot of people encountered the book first during the 1950s and 1960s, as I did. I'm uncertain about the others, but I was a lot younger in those days and Sci-Fi was a lot younger. A book of this genre didn't require as much to impress us.

During the past few years I've made an effort to go back and read a lot of books I loved or hated when I was younger. A lot of those I loved then were pure drivel to me now, and a lot of those I hated cause me to realize what a shallow level I was reading on. Or maybe, what a few decades of life does to change perspectives about literary works.

City's one of the books I loved as a young man that I'm happy to say is still in my list of books I'm happy to have encountered this lifetime. I think you'll be glad all the reviewers said such nice things about it if it causes you to get the book and read it yourself. What else can I say? I hope you read it now, then again when you're my age, and love it twice.

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Summary: The Complete CITY
Review: The Old Earth Books edition of the classic CITY contains the rarely reprinted (& why is a mystery) final CITY story "Epilog" from Astouding: The John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology and his 1976 Foreword. Great stuff. If you haven't read this you really should, you won't be disapointed. And do check out the other Simak reprint from Old Earth Books, the Hugo winning novel WAY STATION, with the best cover art work the book has ever had.

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Summary: Dogs, Robots and Ants Inherit the Earth
Review: The thing that makes this book just a little difficult to get into at first is that the perspective is that of those who inherited the Earth from Mankind. The introduction at the beginning of the story is the kind of introduction you might find today in a book about legends and their sources. While the introduction slows down the reader's entry into the book, the reader later uses the introduction to help tie the eight short stories in the book together into a more coherent framework. What the introduction infers is that the storyteller is an intelligent canine, and the eight stories are the remaining fragments of stories regarding the perhaps mythic creatures called Man. The canine writing the story notes that there are conflicting viewpoints as to whether Man in fact ever existed, or was used to explain the origins of the intelligence of dogs. The perspective of the narrator in the initial introduction and in the introduction of each of the stories is quite interesting and gives the reader a unique perspective.

The stories themselves are interesting, but venture beyond science fiction in a variety of ways. An explanation for ghosts is provided briefly. There are so many elements introduced that are beyond our current knowledge that the story is closer to fantasy. The stories cover genetically engineering dogs to have intelligence comparable to Man's. We see a society that is so wealthy that cities are no longer required and everyone lives on a country estate. Energy is abundant and incredibly cheap. Man has the ability to transform himself into other creatures. A class of man has mutated into incredibly intelligent and powerful beings that build doors to other worlds, and then they left the rest of mankind behind.

Incredibly intelligent robots also appear throughout these stories. I kept wondering why a robot would serve man for millennia when it had intelligence that appeared to surpass man's, however, I had to suspend logic just a bit, though I also assumed that perhaps the robots had laws similar to those that Isaac Asimov later created for robots. A sort of toss in side story that appears in a couple of places is apparently advanced ants. The one flaw with that side story is that ants have existed for millennia in the tropics and have not had to hibernate, and they had all the advantages of the ants in the story. Once again Simak has included another fantastic story element.

These stories were written in the 40s during a time of transition and development of modern science fiction. Science fantasy had yet to be defined, and many early works of science fiction were so bizarre that were they to be published today they might well be considered fantasy versus the previously all-encompassing science fiction category. However, even with the fantastic elements of the story the book is a good read. The perspective of the dogs in the later stories is plausible and interesting. I was most intrigued by the conclusion of the collection. I had anticipated several endings, and yet the actual ending was disturbing and somewhat sobering. Clifford D. Simak tried his very best not to be egocentric with respect to his species.

I think that during the time these stories were written this collection was likely one of the more innovative and interesting works. Today the stories are a bit dated because we have accumulated another 60 years of knowledge. We have learned that hibernation is more difficult that we thought it would be at that time. We have learned that Jupiter does not have a solid surface, and the temperature on the planet is quite hot. It does not appear that cities are likely to be abandoned any time in the near (and from what we can tell, even the far) future. If you can ignore that knowledge, the stories turn out to be quite a bit of fun.

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Summary: The original post human study.
Review: This book was originally published in 1952. It is an anthology of sorts, consisting of "City", "Huddling Places", and "Census" (1944). "Paradise" and "Hobbies", 1946, "Asoep", 1947, and "Trouble with Ants", 1951.

It is extremely interesting how insightful Simak was about the impact of technology on the decentralization of knowledge. Witness the present medium. I orginally read the book about 25 years ago..... it seemed an unlikely although entertaining scenario. Still is but highly entertaining. Probably one of my all time favorite Sci-Fi along with "Earth Abides" and "The Postman".

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Summary: It's a dog's world
Review: Thousands of years in the future, the canine population of planet Earth, along with their robot helpers, sit around campfires and tell each other fables that relate, most controversially, how they owe their ascendance to an extinct and perhaps mythical species of benevolent, if misguided, humans. A bleak, melancholy portrayal of humanity's prospects for survival, "City" is unusual not only for its dystopian vision but also for its often pastoral storytelling.

Originally published during the 1940s as a series in Astounding Science Fiction, these eight stories were gathered into a novel in 1952. For the book, Simak made a few revisions and added a framework of "textual commentaries," featuring remarks from canine critics who debate both the meaning of the tales and the likelihood that humankind ever even existed. The stories themselves focus on the role of the (human) Webster family, whose descendants during the course of thousands of years influence the future of humans, dogs, robots, and even ants. The only character common to all the tales is a robot named Jenkins, who serves first human, then canine masters as various threats present themselves over the course of numerous millennia.

The first three tales describe a deteriorating human society that retreats from urban blight and escapes to remote family outposts, relying almost entirely on robots for supplying the labor and on the wired world for communication and supplies. (Simak's prescient vision of the Internet is one of the most hauntingly accurate prophecies in this book.) As a result, many of the earth's inhabitants suffer from agoraphobia--a combination of simple lethargy and a fear of leaving their homes--and this isolation is amplified in the form of nearly immortal human mutants that live entirely on their own, "disdaining all the artificiality of society."

The most memorable (and most original) pair of tales portrays a few humans who venture outside their homes to other worlds and who inadvertently discover a form of nirvana by assuming the genetic makeup of a mysterious, gas-based life-form on Jupiter. Humanity is thus confronted by a choice: either perpetuation of their own species or the allure of paradise under a different guise.

Simak's initially relaxed pace soon surrenders to a more riveting style, especially because the later stories are more interrelated (both by common characters and by plot devices) than the first three almost-standalone tales. The book's underlying hopelessness, which often flirts with a subtle misanthropy, is hard to explain, however; there's no real apocalypse. Instead of doom or destruction, the future of humanity according to Simak is a world of isolation and loneliness, and perhaps that's the most depressing vision of all.