We did, however, leave behind the Dogs, giving them speech and robots and high ideals. Humanity had screwed up, all our ideas of “progress” were wrong-headed and we couldn’t live up to our potential. These stories are slightly out of that mold, deeply melancholy, although the optimism is still there, way down inside. One of the hallmarks of the science fiction of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s was its visionary quality, often reflected in utopian writing (or dystopian - it wasn’t all sugar and spice, although most of that came later, when the real world started catching up with us) and springing, I think, from its emphasis on the “hard” sciences, which at that point were wells of optimism: better living through technology and the race for space. There is, however, as in so many stories of the period, a romantic vision underlying these tales, and I use the word “vision” advisedly. Simak says in his Author’s Foreword that City was written out of disillusion: “City,” the first story in the series, was published in 1944, in the closing years of the most destructive war in human history, and most of these stories come from the mid- and late 1940s. (Perhaps one might take this as an early model for David Brin’s Uplift series.)
Simak’s City is a series of connected stories, a series of legends, myths, and campfire stories told by Dogs about the end of human civilization, centering on the Webster family, who, among their other accomplishments, designed the ships that took Men to the stars and gave Dogs the gift of speech and robots to be their hands. I remember vividly Poul Anderson’s version, and no less than Spider Robinson had reason to wax eloquent over Heinlein’s. It is, first off, one of the great “future histories” concocted by science fiction writers of the Golden Age. I confess that reading this book was an unsettling experience. Old Earth Books has done us the signal service of reissuing two of Clifford Simak’s most memorable works in honor of the centennial of his birth in 1904, of which City is one. Not by any means least among those names is Clifford D. It was by no means the first science fiction book I had ever read - this was in the days before school libraries were subject to the thought police.), there are names that echo through the memory, the writers who brought visions to life that were fascinating, sometimes frightening, sometimes reassuring, and that made our universe larger: Heinlein, Sturgeon, Asimov, Vance, Pangborn, Clarke, Anderson, among many others. To one who grew up on science fiction (and I really did - the first book I ever bought all on my own was The Big Book of Science Fiction, edited by Groff Conklin I think that was about fifth grade.
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