Remember when you—the naïve philosopher—struck by the similarities of molecule and solar system, imagined your body to be composed of billions of nano-planets and stars? I do. I was twelve years old at the time, working at my parent's grocery, and I was suddenly forced to lean upon my push-broom to keep from falling headlong in a dizzy marvel of surprise. Reading City (1952) is like that. Although now it may look naïve, simplistic, perhaps even shallow, but at the time it seemed so imaginatively...

This is a challenging review as I'm surprised I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I thought I would. Oh, I still enjoyed it, and certainly appreciated it. But it didn’t capture me as tightly as Way Station. I haven’t forgotten that it was written in the 1940’s and I think readers must consider that fact. I’m still excited to read more Simak, and this book works on many levels, but I failed to completely lose myself in it, as I do with my favorite reads. However, Simak as an author continues to gr...

So far the strongest candidate for the best book I read this year.

'City' is a novel which is actually made up of nine stories, originally published separately, but later strung together with a series of 'notes' explaining that these stories are part of the mythological heritage of the civilisation of Dogs, who believe that the existence of Man is most probably only a legend.· City · May 1944 Occasionally, you read an old science fiction story and are just blown away by the remarkable prescience of the author and his or her ability to predict future events.Well...

City: Pastoral SF classic where Rover takes over Originally posted at Fantasy LiteratureCity is a well-loved classic by Clifford D. Simak published back in 1952 and awarded the International Fantasy Award in 1954. It’s actually a collection of linked far-future stories written between 1944 and 1951 about men, mutants, dogs, robots, ants and stranger beings still. It’s told as a series of episodes that trace the evolution of the various species as they reach out to space, but also follows the fat...

This slim white hardcover from the Science Fiction Book Club has caught my eye numerous times over the years, nestled between its bigger shelfmates in my family's science fiction collection. I had a vague knowledge that it was narrated by dogs, and a vague knowledge that this was a "fix-up novel" - a group of short stories tied together with an overarching structure for publication purposes. I'm glad I didn't go into it with any further preconceptions. Simak did an excellent job of linking the s...

Simak did a stellar job with this "fix up" novel, composed of nine separately published short stories, adding a compelling framing narrative and meta-story in the form of editor's notes for each. These are narrated from the POV of a far future civilization of dogs.This is ultimately an apocalyptic tale spanning millennia, and one of man's ultimate legacy, the good and bad. Man goes out not with a bang but a whimper, gradually retreating into himself and his past while supplanted by others either...

Of all the great science fiction writers of the 50s, my favorite is Clifford D. Simak. He is also one of the authors that has fared poorly as we begin the 21th century. His novels are not that easy to find in reprints. While Simak could write of space travel and androids as well as the Heinleins and the Asimovs, he was most comfortable in the setting of rural Wisconsin and generously laced his stories with a sense of American pastoralism. In fact he was often called the pastoralist of science fi...

“Thus far Man has come alone. One thinking, intelligent race all by itself. Think of how much farther, how much faster it might have gone had there been two races, two thinking, intelligent races, working together. For, you see, they would not think alike. They'd check their thoughts against one another. What one couldn't think of, the other could. The old story of two heads.”Ah, that Clifford D. Simak, what a gent. He is one of the most optimistic, compassionate, and humanistic sci-fi authors e...

gosh i loved this one!City is a collection of eight connected stories depicting the future and end of mankind, and the rise of dogs. just as i always suspected, dogs will eventually inherit the earth. good dogs!Simak is a humanist, but a clear-eyed one, an author who doesn't let much sentiment cloud his storytelling. man fails, and fails again, but his strivings are viewed with both careful distance and genuine affection. this is not one of those scifi novels about man being the architect of his...

City by Clifford D. Simak is a fix up, or in other words a group of short stories that are connected to form a novel. City was originally made up of eight short stories, but Simak wrote one more story years after the original publication, a story called Epilogue, and this story has often been included in later editions. It's the story of how men lost the Earth, how dogs and robots took over from man, and how that turned out.After reading the first short story in City I almost gave up on it. That...

I've heard about this novel (series of short stories that are related closely) for years, always referred to in terms of deep respect and honor, and now that I've finished reading it, I can add my own.It was very clever to throw the viewpoint in from robots and dogs and see the lost civilization of man from their viewpoints, but I found it more interesting to see the complete eradication of so much of Earth's life, seen from Jenkin's point of view. Perhaps I'm just a cynical bastard and I love t...

For me there is always a rich taste in classic Sci Fi which I can’t find in recent stories. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy modern sci-fi books as much but there is always a nostalgic feeling in reading classic Sci Fis. City is no exception. Eight different but related stories told in a future time which there is no sign of man on earth. As stories proceed we see how earth become what it is then.Dogs has inherited the earth and they have these stories as historical documents and there theories to be...

“I can't go back," said Towser."Nor I," said Fowler."They would turn me back into a dog," said Towser."And me," said Fowler, "back into a man."  I was blown away by this classic. Starting with an alternative 1950s Simak has written over one hundred thousand years of human history in nine short stories; humbly following the path of one family.The ideas felt fresh, only the optimism dated. But optimism, in the form of solar punk, is up and coming. These stories heavily favored non violence and th...

4.0 to 4.5 stars. I have not read all of Clifford Simak's novels (my bad) but I have enjoyed every one that I have read so far and this book is no exception. The novel is actually a "fix up" series of connected short stories that range from the superb (i.e., 5.0 to 6.0 stars) (the Huddling Place and Desertion) to the very good (Aesops) (i.e., 3.0 to 4.0 stars). All of the stories deal with the decline of the human "cities" and the results on mankind over a vast period of time. The version I read...

I'd read one of the stories in this book before, "Desertion," and loved it. I still think I love that story best, but the whole book is definitely worth reading. In fact, this is one book that I would love to teach, for several reasons.1. It's a fun read, with some interesting conceits (a future Doggish society [made up of a race of intelligent speaking dogs], space travel, a society of ants, etc.)2. It demands close reading skills, not just in the stories themselves but in the Doggish commentar...

This book wasn't at all what I was expecting. I thought it would be a relatively light book to read with the promise of intelligent, talking dogs sitting around a campfire telling stories of Man who no longer ruled Earth and was only a myth to them. But what I soon discovered was, this book was a heavy, mind-boggling, thought-provoking look at the twin societies of Man and Beast, chronicling the step by step downfall of the former and the rise of the latter. This was a highly imaginative collect...

City is a well written and quirky novel of some 200 pages by Clifford Simak. He is considered a grandmaster of sci-fi, winning three Hugo awards over four decades of writing, only Heinlein won more. City is Simak’s second most popular book.In City there are eight connected chapters and an epilogue that together span some 10,000 years of civilization on Earth, Mars and Jupiter. Jenkins is a family robot who provides the constancy between the chapters. In the early chapters we see the humans on Ea...

I really wouldn't attempt to read City as speculative fiction, despite the opening stories and the fact that there's space travel and alternate dimensions. After I saw the reactions of group members to it, I thought I wasn't going to get on with it at all -- totally unscientific, only one or two female characters even mentioned, etc.But then I started reading and the scholarly notes really tickled me. I've read them before, in a sense, in every book that attempts to piece together whether King A...

Why is Clifford Simak virtually a forgotten writer?"City" won the International Fantasy Award in 1952. Simak won a Hugo for his novella, "The Big Front Yard." He also won a Hugo for "Way Station" in 1964. Simak was a big wheel in the science fiction world back then. So again, I ask. why is he forgotten? I have combed the shelves of used book shops, and Simak's books are tough to find. I don't know if this means that collectors tended to hoard Simak's books, or if it means that people commonly th...