And each of the stories follows some humans of the Webster family, telling of the Websters’ roles across human history, both successes and failures. Readers who see SF as an attempt at prediction/prophecy will be disappointed with the direction Simak takes his future history those of us more interested in the story’s insights or context have a wealth of material at hand.īruna (Dutch) – 1965 – cover by Dick Bruna.
Each of City‘s stories are part of the dogs’ oral history, myths passed down from generation to generation of a race called humans-whose existence is hotly contested.
Campbell, who had published all but one of the others in Astounding Science Fiction.) It remains something of a minor classic to this day, having made quite an impact in introducing Simak’s pastoral and mournful themes to science fiction.Ĭity‘s frame story comes in the form of academic notes left by humanity’s successor, intelligent dogs uplifted by a man named Webster. (One more was added in 1971 in a volume honoring editor John W. He continued writing them through 1947, then published one final tale in 1951, at which point they were joined together and sold as the fixup novel City. Clifford Simak’s fame has waned in the years after his death, and he never was one of the more well-known or popular SF authors to begin with. He broke onto the SF scene in 1944 with a series of semi-linked short stories and novellas, a future-history that took humanity out of its near-future cites, into star-studded galaxies, even beyond mere homo sapiens.
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