City

City is a fix-up: it was originally published as a series of short stories chronicling a future history, mostly in Astounding, from 1944 to 1951. In 1952, Simak collected them in a book, adding introductions to each story written by some scholar from the far far future, making it into a work that exists in the future history. Simak wrote one extra City story in 1973, which was incorporated into editions of the book published in 1981 onward, including my 2011 Gollancz edition.

It's certainly of its era: I feel like a lot of sf writers in this period wrote series of short stories covering vast swathes of human history. In that sense, City reminded me of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and especially Cordwainer Smith. But what is different show more than those other future histories is the scope of City: while Asimov, Heinlein, and even Smith chronicle the history of humanity, Simak considers what comes after humanity... and then what comes after that. The only person who really matches Simak for scope is Wells. This is a series of vignettes, linked by some common characters and some related ones, that take us from the abandonment of the cities to the abandonment of the planet Earth itself.

Simak's futurism isn't always right, but the futurism isn't the point, so it doesn't matter. There's a lot to like here, but my favorite was "Hobbies," which I wrote about on its own here. The story focuses on the dogs and robots left on Earth by humanity. Both were created to serve humanity; even though dogs have been raised to sapience, that's still what a dog is. There are also a last few humans. But all of these beings have no work to do—there is nothing left but the "hobbies" of the title. Simak is often praised for his pastoral style, and this thoughtful story is it at its moving best. The last couple stories point toward the fact that things never stop developing. Watch out for the ants!

I also really enjoyed the introductions to each story, written by the dog scholars of the far future attempting to put each story into its original context... but they are from so far in the future that they are not convinced any such creature as man actually existed. Surely he is just part of a creation myth? I'm often a sucker for this kind of faux apparatus, and this is a good example of it, extending the distance between the world of the text and ours. show less

Simak, Clifford D. City. 1952. Introduction by Gwyneth Jones. Gollancz, 2011.
Clifford D. Simak’s City is a fix-up of a fix-up, and it should not hold together, but it does. It began as magazine stories during World War II and was turned into a book with interludes that tied the stories together in 1952. A final story, written in honor of John W. Campbell in 1973, was added as an epilog in 1980. For me, the book is a decades-long conversation with Simak’s friend and younger contemporary, Isaac Asimov. Both treated robots as good and faithful servants, and both were interested in the ultimate fate of humanity. City has the historical sweep of Asimov’s Foundation series, but Simak is not so much interested in social evolution as in show more the vanity of human wishes. City is not really a story about cities. Rather, it is about what happens after cities, when, in an obvious but unavoidable pun, the city has literally gone to the dogs. Cities are abandoned, Simak says, when land is no longer needed to produce food, industry is totally automated, and travel is easy. In this post-scarcity world, cities have outlived their usefulness, and only the city of Geneva and the Webster family hangs on. They advance the evolution of dogs by giving them speech. Indestructible robots to give them the dexterity they need to build their own peaceful civilization. This sounds idyllic, but Simak says it results from the breakdown of all human social ties and the absence of purposeful work that makes life meaningful. Human beings, he says, cannot live by hobbies alone. His point is one that current writers of virtual utopias should remember. In the end, Simak says, the human race will vanish, as will their successors—here, dogs and ants. Asimov saves us with the well-meaning Robots of Dawn, but for Simak, the faithful robot who cannot weep will be left to tell our tale to no one. A classic. 5 stars. show less

Simak used a framing device to link eight existing stories as a fix-up novel in 1951, and City has proven to be one of the enduring such efforts. Later he wrote an Epilog, a ninth story missing from my edition; it isn't clear it adds much to the significance of the original story cycle. The eight were each published in Astounding under editorial direction of John Campbell, curious how much Simak envisioned them of a piece, rather than being unrelated stories forcibly retrofitted. For example, the dogs don't appear until the third story -- odd for what seems so central an element in the overall scenario.

Simak's descriptions of Jupiter involve domes set on firm ground and with crystalline cliffs nearby, none of which exist according to show more current science. Evidently Simak imagined the ammonia atmosphere hid a solid planet, rather than the gas giant with (perhaps) an ocean of liquid hydrogen behaving like molten metal. As with most science fiction, though, the bits he got wrong are trivial when assessing the work overall. City is a novel of ideas, more about what it is to be a person and part of humanity, what is unavoidably caught up in the species and what might be changed, than anything in the literal environment or technology.

In the Foreward, Simak claims the fix-up was written as no sort of protest, but as means of escape, given the disillusion (his word) attending World War II. Fitting then, that the novel ends with the sentient dogs escaping from this world into another. Humans may not be able to escape our fate, defined by innate aggression and an attendant loss of purpose once our post-scarcity civilization provides for all our essential needs -- but it seems we may enable others to escape. In this way, perhaps, human culture outlasts humanity itself. Or that's one scenario that Simak paints for us. show less

I first read this book decades ago, and loved it for its wistful tone and odd, melancholic nostalgia for a future that hadn't happened. I just returned to it to see if it has held up at all, and I'm struck by my fresh reading of it. In light of the times now, the politics, pandemic, and existential crises of 2020-22, "City" by Clifford Simak is a much darker, more sophisticated work than I'd known. It is not so much weirdly-dated SF as it is a mythopoeic elegy for what is lost to changes that cannot be stopped or avoided. In its theme and expression, "City" is more similar to Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles" or Pangborn's "A Mirror For Observers."

It's crucial to remember that Simak wrote the sections of "City" during the last act of show more and years immediately following World War Two: the familiar ways of the world had scorched in flames, genocide, and technological leapfrogging. Little of the past seemed to remain and the new present was hopeful but uncertain in a new Age of Atomics, suburban freeways, and mutually assured destruction. The future was to be all new, the social order unfamiliar. It was not surprising that many feared the changes, feared a future they neither understood nor felt a part of, and reacted with antipathy to countercultures or overly progressive elements.

THAT is the psychological world Simak pours out here: changes overtake human society and people fear the changes, even resist them. Behaviors and properties are clung to as 'traditions' and 'heritage' even when neither understood nor intrinsically needed. Even Jenkins the robot carries on the conservative traits just because it's what he _does_. As time goes by in these tales, the "fall of men" is invoked despite humanity having simply left, moved on to other avatars. We don't watch the next stages of man's journey, we watch those left behind. The Dogs tell the stories as myths, myths with seeds of truths, but myths nonetheless. Simak seems to be wondering how long it would be before the early 20th-century pastoral America he had known had become myth as well. show less

I'm giving this book three and a half stars mostly because I'm more of a literary type than a science fiction fan, and there are stretches in "City" where it feels like the author is more interested in making an argument than relating a story: telling instead of showing, in other words. But "City" is still full of interesting ideas, and once in a while, especially in the book's latter stories, the author manages to communicate them in a way that might leave the reader feeling spooked and perhaps saddened. "City" is a good example of how science fiction can help answer both literature's most important question -- what does it mean to be human? -- and one of science's central imponderables -- will the human race survive?

"City was written show more in the shadow of the Second World War, and it shows: Simak's view of human nature is exceedingly bleak. He sees humanity as fundamentally self-destructive, the bearer of an ineradicable tragic flaw. The book spends much of its time wondering what sort of civilization might have better chances of survival in the long term. A race of mutant humans? Dogs? Robots, perhaps? The idea that humans might be replaced by some other civilization seems not to trouble the author at all, which suggests a commendably clear-eyed view of things, considering the fact that the book was written in the late nineteen forties, and shows an excellent understanding of what often calls deep time. What's a thousand years to a robot, after all? The author's literary executor notes in the introduction, "City" was perhaps one of the first works of science fiction to shift its focus from humanity to a more inclusive view of life in all of its forms. Simak deserves credit for putting real effort into imagining into a society run by these other beings might be like and what its values might be. In other words, he writes these non-human races from the inside out, which takes real imagination.

The author's not afraid to blur his categories, either, which sometimes makes the book truly fascinating. Throughout the book, and even as millennia pass, some traces of values and practices that their human creators imparted to the races they created -- super-intelligent dogs and robots -- remain. Like Brian Aldiss's "Galaxies Like Grains of Sand," "City" imposes a eons-long plot structure on what was originally a collection of stories, and it's a much better book for it, and not just because a text written hyper-intelligent canines arguing about whether the human race ever existed is slyly humorous in its own right. In "City," dogs and robots pass down myths and stories whose origins are unknown to them. They keep traditions and protect places and things whose original purpose has been forgotten. Simak seems to be asking how history turns into myth and how the values that myth creates can help hold a society together. Robots take on human attributes, while dogs, try as they might, struggle to eradicate their past roles as pets and helpmates to humans. Simak shows how cultural tendencies might echo down the centuries. The prose may be workmanlike, but there's a lot of food for thought in these stories. Recommended to readers who, like myself, are trying to escape the carefully delineated preserve of literary fiction to see what's out there in other genres. show less

This book could almost be retitled The World According To Simak because it seems to sum up his view of his fellow humans: one way and another, that’s what all the dogs, robots, mutants and ants in City are—various pictures of us.
   The dogs, I think, are the way Simak wished humans could be: uncomplicated, intelligent but amiable, content (like him) to just sit on the porch in the sun listening to the birds singing. Then there are the ‘robots’, who aren’t robots at all; these are humans too, but servile ones this time who do all the work. There are the ‘mutants’, which are Simak’s picture of experts of all kinds—or intellectuals rather, smart-asses, know-it-alls, wiseguys smirking and sniggering from behind their show more hands, people (in Simak’s view) too clever for their own good. And lastly there are the ants: these are us yet again, but seen from above in a sort of bird’s-eye view of humanity: scurrying and teeming everywhere, building cities, mindlessly covering the green of his beloved Wisconsin in brick and concrete. Meanwhile, all the actual humans in City vanish in one way or another, and I got the impression that this was wishful thinking on the author’s part: Simak’s understated way of saying to the rest of us, ‘I wish you’d all just shove off and leave me in peace.’
   I didn’t dislike City because it’s strange (I love surreal and strange) or incoherent (which it is, particularly scientifically). I didn’t even baulk at most of Simak’s pictures of humanity—I’ve spent much of my own life watching with the same dismay the woods and meadows of England being tarmacked and concreted over. But then the penny finally dropped. One glaring thing about the Websters, the human family whose story we’re largely following here, is that we never once see any of them cleaning a kitchen say, doing the laundry, weeding the garden or lugging heavy bags of groceries up the steep gravel drive to the Big House. The ‘robots’ (i.e. the servants, the drudges—the staff) do all that sort of thing. ‘Leave me in peace’ really means ‘Leave me in peace to sit out here on my porch, glass of whiskey balanced on my knee, watching the world go by, setting the world straight, while my loyal and obedient staff of lesser mortals do all the work.’ It’s an unpleasant, and all-too-familiar, picture of an ‘ideal’ world. show less

Pick up the book, see that it features stories told from the vantage point of civilization of evolved dogs, but don’t immediately put it back on the shelf. Trust me. This collection is a gem and maybe my favorite Simak so far. On one hand it is a collection of stories that follow the decline of humankind, but it is also a fascinating look at what humanity means and aspires to. The dog-focused stories are terrific, and the robots that are part of dog society are very interesting plot devices as sentient artifacts of humankind.