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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I Am Crying All Inside and Other Stories by Clifford D. Simak

Published by Open Road Media on October 20, 2015

Collecting stories that span four decades, this volume offers a worthy introduction to Clifford Simak’s short fiction. The stories are representative of the subjects that animated much of Simak’s fiction during his long career, including robots, mutants, and time travel. The real treat for Simak fans, however, is the previously unpublished “I Had No Head and My Eyes Were Floating Way Up in the Air,” a story that Simak wrote for inclusion in Harlan Ellison’s never-to-be-published The Last Dangerous Visions. Of course, the story’s title makes a playful allusion to Ellison’s own work. The story is about a prideful man who discovers and lays claim to a planet, only to be remade in the image of … something other than a man. Simak’s dark take on what it means to be human is one of the volume’s highlights.

Robots are the central characters in “I Am Crying All Inside,” which draws a distinction between folk (who drink moonshine and stand in the shade when it’s hot) and people (who don’t). Those with wealth and power have gone into space, leaving behind the obsolete folk and people. The story plays with the theme of human dependence on robots which, in science fiction, always leads to a bad end. (Personally, sitting around and drinking moonshine while robots do all the work seems like a pretty good life to me.) If it had included dogs, the story could easily have been wedged into City, the novel that Simak formed from a series of related stories.

Intergalactic traders (a mixture of humans and robots) plan to cash in on a contract for tubers from which an important drug can be extracted, but the natives on the planet where the tubers are grow have become unexpectedly reluctant to part with their crops. Could the drunken alien they found picnicking on the planet have something to do with their reticence? In the tradition of science fiction tales that extoll the virtues of competition, “Installment Plan” suggests that the competitive nature of humans will always give them an edge, even when their alien competitors cheat.

Robots also appear in “Ogre” (in the form of an annoyingly meticulous bookkeeper), but the story is about alien plant life and the addictive music made by trees. Like “Installment Plan,” “Ogre” involves greedy humans underestimating insidious aliens.

“All the Traps of Earth” is about a robot who has been in operation for longer than the law allows (another subject Simak wove into the City stories). It addresses several of Simak’s favorite themes: the right to be yourself, to define your own identity (albeit in the context of a robot); the nature of justice; whether a robot can have a soul; and the benefits of living a simple, useful life, meeting the needs of others while satisfying the need for companionship. Like many robot stories, “All the Traps of Earth” can easily be understood as a metaphor for intolerance of anyone who is different from the norm. But the story also involves evolution, another of Simak’s recurring topics, this time in the form of evolving robots. It is my favorite story in the volume.

“Small Deer” is a time travel story that explains the extinction of the dinosaur -- a fate that might soon be visited upon smaller inhabitants of Earth. A longer time travel story, “Gleaners,” provides a lighthearted view of the bureaucratic turmoil involved in visiting the past.

“Madness from Mars,” a story about the discovery of intelligent life on Mars, is more dated and less successful than the other stories, but it remains an interesting take on the choices (and excuses) humans will make to cover up a disaster.

“The Call from Beyond” mixes science fiction (primarily space travel and gene manipulation) with horror. A mutant flees to Pluto to escape persecution and discovers that Earth is not the only dangerous place to live. The story echoes some of the themes Simak explored in Ring Around the Sun.

For a change of pace and a seemingly odd choice for the volume, “Gunsmoke Interlude” is a western, one of many (according to the editorial notes) that Simak wrote during the middle years of the twentieth century. A good story is a good story, regardless of genre, and this one, about a gunslinger who makes a hard decision, is one of the better stories in the anthology.

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Ring Around the Sun by Clifford D. Simak

First published in 1953

First published in 1953 after being serialized in a science fiction magazine, Ring Around the Sun continues to hold profound meaning for the modern reader. Simak's early take on the multiverse theory (which he describes as a series of worlds, each traveling a second behind the last) anticipates a theme that would later become commonplace in science fiction. The novel also addresses evolution in the guise of mutants who have abilities that are unavailable to most people. They aren't super-powered, but they have a strong intuitive sense that helps them understand people and situations, causing them to gravitate to positions of leadership.

None of these themes are known to Jay Vickers as the novel begins. He knows only that new products are appearing -- razor blades that never grow dull, affordable cars that will last forever, houses that are freely available to people with low incomes, artificial carbohydrates that promise to end famine. The value of these remarkable achievements is disputed by those who view them as a challenge to an economy that depends on new product sales for continuing employment of factory workers. Simak doesn't use the phrase "planned obsolescence" (the phrase was not popularized until 1954) but, always a cutting edge thinker, Simak's novel illustrates both the benefit and harms of deliberately manufacturing products that will require replacement.

As Vickers becomes aware of rumblings about a conspiracy to destroy the American economy (given the time frame, communists are the natural suspects), he is approached by a man who blames mutants for the products. Vickers eventually learns the truth, and learns some surprising things about his true nature -- surprising to the reader, not just to Vickers.

The novel's themes -- the tension between business and consumers, suspicion of and discrimination against those who are labeled as "different," enslavement to technology and commerce, the advantages of a simple lifestyle rooted in self-sufficiency, the desire to escape mundane reality by living an invented "second life," the nature of evolution and the purpose of life -- are enduring. Although decades have passed since its publication, nothing about Ring Around the Sun feels dated. It is a classic work of sf from one of the genre's strongest thinkers.

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