Yzabel / July 4, 2015

City by Clifford D. Simak

My rating: [rating=3]

Blurb:

Intelligent canines in a far-future city preserve the legends and lore of their absent human masters.

Thousands of years have passed since humankind abandoned the city—first for the countryside, then for the stars, and ultimately for oblivion—leaving their most loyal animal companions alone on Earth. Granted the power of speech centuries earlier by the revered Bruce Webster, the intelligent, pacifist dogs are the last keepers of human history, raising their pups with bedtime stories, passed down through generations, of the lost “websters” who gave them so much but will never return. With the aid of Jenkins, an ageless service robot, the dogs live in a world of harmony and peace. But they now face serious threats from their own and other dimensions, perhaps the most dangerous of all being the reawakened remnants of a warlike race called “Man.”
 
In the Golden Age of Asimov and Heinlein, Clifford D. Simak’s writing blazed as brightly as anyone’s in the science fiction firmament. Winner of the International Fantasy Award, City is a magnificent literary metropolis filled with an astonishing array of interlinked stories and structures—at once dystopian, transcendent, compassionate, and visionary.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

A hard one to rate, for sure. 3.5 stars?

On the one hand, it’s one of the classics of “old science fiction” I’ve always wanted to read—I only recently linked its English title to the French one. And, like many stories written several decades ago, it retains a quaint charm. Science that was prominent in minds at the time (atomic power…). Themes of a better world, of Man evolving into better beings, renouncing the old ways of killing, even of living in cities. Openings towards strange, new dimensions, even though reaching for those would involve a complete change of perception. But also sadness: the end of a world, of several worlds, humanity devolving into solitary creatures, then nothing, leaving Earth into the “hands” or dogs and robots. A sort of paradise, untainted by the concepts haunting human beings… yet here, too, a solitary one, for while the dogs developed their own society, they, too, were haunted by the idea of Man, kept alive by Jenkins, the faithful robot who served the Webster family.

On the other hand, I have to admit that a lot of those were painfully outdated for a 21st-century person. I’d probably have appreciated these stories more if I had read them when I was much younger—in other words, especially when it came to all those “atomic” thingies, back when I still had recollections (although heavily filtered through my child’s eyes) of Chernobyl, and a vague fear of the Cold War. I would’ve missed other themes, for sure, but maybe some of the “scientific” ones wouldn’t have struck me as so wobbly. Granted, this was unavoidable; a lot of SF classics would suffer the same fate. It did bother me to an extent, and that was really too bad.

The biological side of science here didn’t make much sense either: mutants; people turning themselves into creatures adapted to life on Jupiter; ants developing a kind of clockwork/steam power; dogs being given words and voice while still forced to rely on robots for want of hands (why would surgery on vocal chords translate into heavy genetic changes in just a few generations?). And generally speaking, the Earth described in “City” was just too big, too empty, to justify the maintainenance of robots as a whole (no factories were mentioned, for instance), with the passage of thousands of years emphasising the “how did they manage to last for so long?” question.

And yet, I cannot deny these stories, as well as the way they are linked, a certain power. Not in the writing itself, not in the obsolete or weird science, but in how they conveyed strong feelings. The despair of one man, whose fears doomed humanity to lose an important philosophical theory that could’ve changed the world forever. The end of a city, abandoned by people who preferred to live in the country, an echo of the suburbian dream. Men left behind and choosing to dive into endless sleep in the last surviving city, forever enclosed within countermeasures long forgotten, for there was no point to staying awake anymore and kill their boredom with hobbies become meaningless. Robots performing tasks even after their owners had died and gone. Dogs keeping a promise, passed down from a long-dead ancestor, a promise the meaning of which had been somewhat lost. Man, both the god-creator and a legend in which dogs only half believed.

It *is* definitely strange, for the human characters were not particularly striking. I guess the book managed to tell what it had to tell through other means, among which the dogs and Jenkins?

So I could not wrap my mind around the nonsensical science… but the feelings were here, and kept coming back at me, along with reflections on what it means to be human, on what humans could d/evolve into. And although this wasn’t my favourite read of the year, it will stay with me for some time no matter what, and I would still recommend it.