My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is what I couldn’t help but imagine the talking dogs in this book looked like (together with the robotic “hands”). Minus the gun, cause dogs in City never kill.
Read this in audiobook form. I think it was the same guy who narrated the Replay audiobook. Maybe, can’t bother to check.
City is 8+1 connected stories passed down to the dogs of the future that tell of Earth and man (if such a being ever existed and isn’t just a product of legend). There’s a quasi-logarithmic time interval between each of the stories: the first takes place in the ’90s, the second somewhere in the 21st century, the last is something like 17,000 years in the future.
Even though dogs, robots and ants appear as successors to human civilization on Earth, with each species following a different philosophy inspired by or directly influenced by mankind, and although the stories are supposed to be retold by talking dogs of the far future, this is basically still a story about humans. Make no mistake, people in the future will obviously instill the same kind of vain belief in the march of progress and Prometheanism to any and all prospective “managers” of Earth. Under the dogs, who are first charged to follow mankind’s footsteps when our foolishness won’t allow us to “reach our true potential”, a “brotherhood of animals” is formed to unite all mute animals and make them useful, i.e. workers. That’s progress.
Really?
I don’t blame Mr. Simak. This is quite old sci-fi and it makes sense that works from the ’50s would succumb to such, ahem, easy ideas, or at least outmoded to our eyes. While listening, I caught myself often thinking “no, Cliff, you’re going too big on this. You’re missing the trees for the supposed forest. This future feels lifeless, lost in the blur of abstracted big idea”. And true, I was not sure what in the end was the point of it all, even with the added story which served as an epilogue and which was added decades later.
I don’t feel as if I caught any kind of glimpse of alternative universes, worlds or future societies: just a curious collection of stories based on ’50s American/Western ideals projected to the blank canvas of times yet unseen. At some point there is the notion in the book that humans would invent the bow and arrow in all possible timelines, and that, if given the opportunity, they would always go all the way from there to the atomic bomb. Humanity’s free, as long as they go down this predetermined path. Like in my last game of Civilization.
However, I must admit that the segment on Jupiter alone pushes Cities up a star for me. I found it much more innovative, prescient of trends in what’s been passed down as the changing collective human consciousness and culture in ways the rest of the book just wasn’t.
I’m closing with this little segment that explains parallel dimension beautifully:
He patted Ebenezer’s head and pulled Ebenezer’s ears.
“Look here, Ebenezer, I don’t seem to place these cobblies.”
“They aren’t any place,” said Ebenezer. “Not on this earth, at least.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Like there was a big house,” said Ebenezer. “A big house with lots of rooms. And doors between the rooms. And if you’re in one room, you can hear whoever’s in the other rooms, but you can’t get to them.”
“Sure you can,” said Webster. “All you have to do is go through the door.”
“But you can’t open the door,” said Ebenezer. “You don’t even know about the door. You think this one room you’re in is the only room in all the house. Even if you did know about the door you couldn’t open it.”