As the book progresses, though, some humans evolve to the point of being incapable of reaching out to anyone else. So it would seem this outcome is a blessing for the world. It’s clear from much of Simak’s fiction, he had a preference for sparsely populated rural places. Only politicians, a few businessmen, and some eccentric holdouts remain. Large parcels of land and affordable houses have lead to a massive exodus from urban centers. Advances in atomic power, cheap construction techniques, and hydroponics have freed humans from the close-packed confines of cities. The first story, “City,” presents a 1990 drastically different from how it really turned out. For each story, Simak wrote an interstitial explaining what different dog philosophers thought about the veracity of each story, as well as any meaning it might hold for their society. When Simak collected the stories, he presented them as a tales told by dogs to each other as perhaps no more than legends. His depiction of humanity’s downfall and supplantation is remorseless. Simak was a gentle writer, so there is little anger or bitterness in the novel, but he wasn’t prone to sentimentality either.
In an essay on City, Robert Silverberg wrote that the story “Desertion” was written in 1943 in direct response to reports from Europe about the Holocaust. Instead, it only increased by many magnitudes. I suppose following the First World War, there was some hope that humanity would avoid that sort of mass slaughter again. That revulsion was so intense that Simak contemplated the extinction of his own species and its replacement by a better one. “The series was written in a revulsion against mass killing and as a protest against war.” Perhaps because we, by which I mean the post-WW II generations, have grown up aware of the deepest, most evil tendencies of humanity, it’s difficult to appreciate completely the anger and despair over what happened during the 1930s and 40s. It is a book conceived of in anger and despair, yet one that strives to posit a better, more humane world - even if it’s one devoid of humans. It’s a fix-up of nine stories, eight written between 19, and one more, added to later editions, in 1973. Simak, unfolds over thousands of years, telling of the end of humanity, the rise of dogs and robots to terrestrial preeminence, and finally, the near abandonment of Earth. Then each family circle gathers at the hearthstone and the pups sit silently and listen and when the story’s done they ask many questions:Ĭity (1952), by Clifford D.
These are the stories that the Dogs tell when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north.
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