City [Paperback]

Simak has been called a pastoral writer, a stronghold of old USA communal values. In contrast with other more pessimistic SF writers, he should be a good all american farming boy. Many SF tales of those years (40-60 of the 20th century)are optimistic and show a great confidence on the capabilities of humans and technical progress.

Nevertheless, this novel is far from that: he portraits a world in which technology has made Earth useless, the struggle for life is over, and so society falls apart. Through succesive generations of a family (all of them fail their high mission) he describes Earth's decay: first society as such, then the planet itself is abandoned for Mars or Jupiter where men become Jovians, a more gifted race, then the last humans go back to the stone ages. Only robots and gentically modified and speaking dogs stay behind to prepare a better future to those men, a task which seems nearly doomed to failure due to our intrinsic violence. On the other side, some of those misfits left behind turn into mutants with extraordinary mental powers (telepathy, superior intelligence, extravagant whims) and create a new breed of ants which in their turn take the same menacing trait as men.

Dogs and the last of the robots are left to wonder what could be, what will be...

Not all together an optimistic tale. There are robots, there are stars, but Simak is not Asimov and there's not a happy ending but a melancholic one.

City is great science fiction, a social commentary of sorts told in a unique and highly effective manner. The tales collected in this book are the myths that have been told by generation after generation of Dogs. Dog scholars debate their origin, and only Tige is so bold as to argue that Man ever truly existed. The majority argument makes sense--man was a highly illogical creature, too selfish and materialistic to ever survive long enough to form a lasting, advanced culture. These stories themselves basically tell the story of the Webster family, a remarkable family whose genealogical line was gifted with genius yet cursed with failures. As the story goes, humans abandoned the cities and sought a bucolic lifestyle, shedding the old tendencies to huddle together in cities for protection. They explored the solar system, and in time the majority of the population sought an alien bliss in the form of Jupiter's native life forms. One Webster had a vision of two civilizations, man and dog, working together to plot a new future--he utilized deft surgical means to enable dogs to speak, he designed special lenses to allow dogs to see as men do, and he designed robots to aid dogs by serving as their hands. Over the years, man's society continued to break down, and eventually a Webster manages to shut off man from the world at large, determined to let the dogs create a new earth free of man's dangerous ideas and influences. Jenkins, the faithful robot servant of the Websters, oversees the dogs' evolution. Unfortunately, the Dog world was not isolated from a handful of human beings after all, and eventually a man builds a bow and arrow and kills a fellow creature, thus upsetting the balance of life all over again. There are many more facets of the story than I have just mentioned, but one central point that seems to emerge from the stories is that man is inherently "bad." Jenkins had tried very hard to erase the memories of the straggling number of humans living in the era of the Dogs, and the fact that a man eventually killed a fellow creature means that man's troubles did not arise from our remote ancestors' taking a wrong path on the road to civilization but that in fact the fault lies in fact finds an inherent flaw in man's social makeup. Reading this rich, multi-layered tale, one can certainly understand why modern Dogs simply cannot believe that such a creature as Man ever existed.

I enjoyed this book tremendously. The ending did not provide a sense of closure, but such a work of fiction as this would be hard to wrap up tightly with no loose ends. Simak presents a valuable viewpoint on society and mankind in general, and the unique viewpoint offered through the eyes of the Dogs serves to highlight the points Simak makes. My favorite part of the book is the section of notes before each tale, wherein we learn about the debate among Dog scholars as to whether or not these stories have any basis in fact, with the stubborn Tige dissenting from the majority opinion of Bouncer, Rover, and others that these are just myths and legends with no basis in fact, that Man is effectively the anti-Dog and was created by ancient storytellers for satirical or educational purposes. From now on, when I hear someone say the world is going to the dogs, I will think to myself that such a happenstance would not really be that bad, all things considered.

City is a fix-up novel culled from the pages of Astounding and comprising of eight related stories and additional linking text.

`City', is a tale of men, a tale which is being analysed in the linking text by a group of sentient dogs who believe the tales told by Dogs of the race of Men to be merely fables and Man himself to be a myth.

Simak's naïve and somewhat surreal view of the future is based very much on his love for small-town America and its communities and values, and is often tinged with nostalgia for a way of life which has passed.

The City of the title story is represented by one of its residential areas, a place of suburban houses and lawns which, like the rest of the City, is almost abandoned. Centralised automated farming technology has made vast tracts of land free for habitation and this, combined with the bizarre concept of an atomic plane for every home has lured people away to private estates in the country.

The worthy officials of the City Council however, refuse to accept that their City is dead and are in the process of evicting the last remaining residents who are squatting in the empty houses, unwilling to abandon the community where they spent their lives.

It's a strange and unreal tale reminiscent of Ray Bradbury, and is full of poetry and atmosphere.

`Huddling Place' take us further into the future, to where descendant of one of the City's characters has become an agoraphobic recluse in his country house, where he lives with his robot butler Jenkins. Having abandoned the cities, humanity is now abandoning the Earth, either for Mars or the interiors of the their homes from where they can travel `virtually' via a holographic projection network. His agoraphobia prevents him from flying to Mars to save Juwain, the ancient Martian philosopher who was on the verge of producing a practical philosophy for humanity which would occasion the transformation of the race.

`Census' takes us forward in time again to the same house where the Webster grandson has surgically (rather than genetically) altered dogs enabling them to speak. Mankind is now heading for the stars while isolated groups of mutated humans live quietly in the wilderness.

Simak is again enjoining a return to a mere pastoral existence in which technology is only employed as a means to that end.

Technological developments here have allowed those with pioneering spirit to leave, those who were restricted (physically and spiritually) by existence within the city have been freed, allowing others the space to breathe within and alongside Nature.

And so it goes on... Humanity, partly as a result of the Juwain philosophy being released across the earth, is transformed, and is converted into a near-immortal form of life of high intelligence which can live on or in the planet Jupiter, abandoning the Earth to a handful of humans, the Dogs, the mutants and the robots.

Simak was never a writer for technical details. Jupiter is described as having a surface, and the Jovian `conversion process' is hastily drawn with little explanation as to the nature of the process, something which no doubt would be explained as `genetic engineering' today.

`City' is a novel which is ultimately flawed by internal confusion of identity. The linking text implies that the stories are fables from ancient Dog History, and their content supports this, but the style seems at odds with the somewhat fairytale nature of the later stories in which talking bears, wolves, racoons and squirrels bring a rather schmaltzy Disney-esque sentimentality to the narrative.

Having said that, Simak attempts to explore the issue of what it means to be human. The humans, en-masse, chose the path of enlightenment offered by the conversion to Jovian forms, a path rejected by the Webster family (whose genealogy links all these stories) and a handful of others.

The legacy of humanity lies with the robots who are dedicated to developing the race of Dogs, unpolluted by human values and failings. Man is seen to be a creature willing to kill for what he wants, as when one of the Websters considers killing the Jovian `prototype' Fowler in order to prevent the human race's mass exodus to Jupiter, or John Webster's solution to the problem of Joe the mutant's experimental ants (who eventually threaten the entire planet) which is to poison them.

This may be reading far too much into what is at the end of the day a rather patchwork construction which, though poetic and inventive, fails to provide a satisfactory denouement.