It's crucial to remember that Simak wrote the sections of 'City' during the last act of and years immediately following World War Two: the familiar ways of the world had scorched in flames, genocide, and technological leapfrogging. In its theme and expression, 'City' is more similar to Bradbury's 'The Martian Chronicles' or Pangborn's 'A Mirror For Observers.' It is not so much weirdly-dated SF as it is a mythopoeic elegy for what is lost to changes that cannot be stopped or avoided. In light of the times now, the politics, pandemic, and existential crises of 2020-22, 'City' by Clifford Simak is a much darker, more sophisticated work than I'd known. I just returned to it to see if it has held up at all, and I'm struck by my fresh reading of it. I first read this book decades ago, and loved it for its wistful tone and odd, melancholic nostalgia for a future that hadn't happened. 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. Simak's writing blazed as brightly as anyone's in the science fiction firmament.

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 Isaac Asimov and Robert A.

With the aid of Jenkins, an ageless service robot, the dogs live in a world of harmony and peace. 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. 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.

This award-winning science fiction classic explores a far-future world inhabited by intelligent canines who pass down the tales of their human forefathers.

City by Clifford D. Simak