City by Clifford D. Simak

First published in novel form in 1952 and revised in 1980; published by Open Road Media on July 21, 2015

In City, Clifford Simak imagined a future in which cities are dying. In early parts of the novel, cities are being abandoned as people flee to the country, where they can live like kings on large lots, commuting to work in the family plane. Later in the novel, Earth has all but been abandoned by humans, the population having fled to Jupiter and other planets, leaving behind a small settlement in Geneva and a bunch of forgotten cities, robots, and dogs.

Like many other sf novels of its era, City is a fix-up. Simak strung together stories he had written that occupy the same future history, most of which involve members of the Webster family over a number of generations, served always by Jenkins, their nearly ageless robot. Simak bridges the stories with new material that provides continuity. The transitional entries consist of the writings of a canine academic examining the old and beloved stories of Earth’s past. Dogs have inherited the Earth, as they should.

In the first story, squatters occupy homes abandoned by families that have moved to the country, making the cities havens for members of an underclass who have nowhere else to go. The few remaining farmers who grow crops in soil can’t compete with the hydroponic farms and, lacking jobs, are forced to join the squatters. The government has decided that the squatters and land farmers and other malcontents need to be “adjusted,” a notion that is resisted by people who prefer to think for themselves.

In the second installment, a man whose family (the Websters) has occupied an estate for generations discovers that he (like his father before him) has developed an irrational fear of leaving his land -- yet the future may depend on his ability to overcome that fear by helping a Martian who holds the key to humanity’s future. The grandson of the man in the second story is responsible for the talking dogs that appear in the third story. Apart from establishing the legacy of dogs, the story explores the future of human evolution.

The fourth tale also involves a dog, although this one hasn’t learned to talk, at least in the conventional way. The dog and his fleas accompany the dog’s human companion on a mission to learn why people have been unable to adapt to life on Jupiter. I get the sense that the story wasn’t written as part of the same future history but the one that follows continues the fourth story and ties in with the rest of the volume. The fourth and fifth stories both feature the same characters, a man who becomes something other than a man and a dog who becomes something other than a dog (although still a best friend). The stories discuss the wonderful futures that might lay within mankind’s grasp, and whether mankind would, or should, move in those directions.

By the sixth tale, the planet is pretty much empty unless you count the dogs and robots and mutants. One of the last humans on the planet, living with the rest of the humans in Geneva (the last city in the world), is a Webster. He returns to his ancestral home where he meets the family robot, talks to dogs, wonders what the dogs hear that men can’t, and asks himself what went wrong. This is a quiet, surprising story about hope and rebirth. It is one of the book’s highlights.

Jenkins returns in the next-to-last story, which takes place about 7,000 years after the first one. Dogs (and a bunch of other talking animals) have inherited the Earth. This is where we find out whether they’ve made it a better world than humans did.

The final story in the original volume takes place about 12,000 years beyond the first story and, wouldn’t you know it, people are gone but ants are still troublesome. The story is pure Simak: a quiet, thoughtful story about the virtue of doing the right thing even when the result will be sad, because it is better to be sad (or dead) than to betray your values.

City was published in 1952. It was reissued in 1980 with an additional story, written twenty years after the others and appropriately titled “Epilog.” The story was Simak’s contribution to a volume that commemorated John W. Campbell after his death. The epilog is a perfect fit, showing no sign of a two decade lag since the original stories were concluded.

City touches upon themes that are common in Simak’s fiction: individualism that resists “mob psychology”; the inevitable continuation of evolution; the human drive for social approval; the virtue of a simple agrarian lifestyle; how wonderful it would be to use our brains in full, instead of using just a tiny part; the importance of work and sacrifice to humanity’s future; the benefits of conflict and competition and tenacity; the curse of memory; and the belief that as time goes on and on, things will get better, although not in ways that we can possibly anticipate. Adding those themes together creates the sense that Simak believed in a human destiny that we are still far from achieving -- and maybe a canine destiny, and a robot destiny, as well.

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