There is a whole side plot about mutant humans that lacks in detail and we don’t learn enough about anyone to really care for them.

The characters are very bland repetitive people – most from the same family (that’s how the story connects) – and the only one with any sort of personality is Jenkins, the robot butler that serves the family and then guards the house for 12000 years. That being said, the tone and overall conceit of the novel are very consistent and easy to unpack. We have stories set on Earth, one set on Jupiter, and then a final story about sentient ants and parallel universes that gets a bit off track. It’s less about a continuous story than instances or impetuses to change certain junctures of human development. It’s not quite deep but it’s interesting based on Simak’s own discussion of the novel in the Foreward (in my 1976 version) which talks about his reaction to the nuclear bombs dropped in WWII. The even bigger idea of the book is an extrapolation into why human nature is violent and whether that violence has a purpose or not. The idea is that dogs and robots are all that are left on Earth after most humans have gradually left the planet to cultivate other worlds. The novel is set up as eight small stories that are self-contained but carry a plot showing the changes on Earth between 190 years in the future. He was worried about not just nuclear devastation (legit) but a society that he saw as slowly stultifying into uselessness. That’s why I love to read classic science fiction!įrom the Foreward, and the time period, it’s obvious Simak was attempting to wrestle with the changing world around him. This novel would be entirely different were it written today – and that’s fine. It’s interesting as a piece of reactionary art from a specific time period. Overall, did I like it? Yes, it was really interesting.

It’s both a story and not a story, it’s post-apocalyptic but not in the same sense that we’re used to, and it has some dated aspects (as to be expected). This is a hard book to review because it requires a lot of balance. I decided to read this novel after hearing it was comparable to Sea of Rust, though they definitely only share the “robot” aspect and nothing else. “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.” It won the International Fantasy Award and a lot of the themes in the novel are still applicable today! Simak’s City is a classic science fiction from 1952.

1952 simak novel