Originally published as "City". The fore-shadowing prologue and the introduction to each chapter are written by a dog - a historian. The rest of the book starts in 1990 when thanks to helicars, hydroculture and robots the need for cities and farms has gone. The book follows the fortunes of the Webster family and their domestic robot Jenkins. Without targets, nuclear weapons have lost their purpose, and atomic energy is cheap. Except for a few squatters and old people, populations have fled to the countryside. We know this because a character has told a group of people (who know it already) the history.
The dog writes that puppies have played with robots like those in the book for millennia. It's a surprise to the dogs that the now extinct humans had robots (and may even have invented them) because humans in other ways seemed primitive. Did man ever exist? Unlikely. The dogs are so tightly integrated to their robots (not least to benefit from the robots' dexterity) that it's hard to distinguish between dog and robot. The dogs don't understand how the robots work. They think that stars are luminous dots in the sky.
Chapter 2 jumps to 2117. Holodecks and hologram phones. The dog commentator thinks that the routine travel to Mars is sheer fantasy. In chapter 3 there's a talking dog (the result of experiments), and interstellar travel. There are still people (mostly men, it seems) who prefer to live with nature. There are mutant humans too (natural ones) who are telepathic, brilliant. They attribute their leap to the freedom from chains of society. They're selfish. The government let them live but see them as dangerous, keeping them under surveillance (dogs, not cameras, watch over them). In Chapter 4 we start on Jupiter. Rather than terraform it, people (and a dog too) are converted into a form that can survive on the planet - with a new body and senses, and mind-sharing. It's such a pleasant experience that the first people don't want to transform back into human form. The government fear that if the public knows this, everybody will want to change too. Meanwhile back on Earth the dogs get other animals to talk, each sort of intelligence offering new insights.
The humans who don't go to Jupiter choose The Sleep - centuries of suspended animation, dreaming. One of the remaining wood-dwellers invents a bow and arrow. After 7,000 years Earth becomes what we knew from the start it would become - a planet of servile robots and unambitious dogs. The dogs get Jenkins a new body for his 7,000th birthday. More mobile now, he visits the Mutants' base. He sees no mutants. They've developed stargates. "Shadows" are on the loose, killing animals. Jenkins decides to teach the remaining humans about farming and hunting.
Chapter 8, the final chapter, is 10,000 years in the future. The Mutants' base has been growing, but only because ants have taken it over and are using micro/nano-tech to infect other beings. They'll take over the world unless they're stopped. The venerable Jenkins discovers from the only Webster still alive how ants can be killed, then decides not to use insecticide, because killing is wrong.
The framing device and the unreliability of the supposedly ancient text means that we can perhaps excuse the huge plot-holes (some much easier to see with hindsight) and the at times creaky writing. Advances in technology are patchy, and I find it hard to believe in a near future where for 150 years nobody in the Solar System is murdered. Computers aren't pervasive - 2/3rds of the way through the book there's a press meeting for the "signori della stampa e della radio" (p.113) - radio! Networking/Web ideas are absent, and AI is never a threat.
After finishing the book I read that it was originally 8 short stories, and that the dog commentary (which I liked) was added later.
Other reviews
- Paul Weimer (A suite of stories that merges Simak’s love of dogs, his interest in rural settings and landscapes, use of religion and faith, and his interest in robots all in one package ... With an emphasis on the characters, the expanse of time, and the inevitable triumph, tragedy, and changes that Humanity and his successors will undergo, City remains as readable today to science fiction audiences as it did on its first publication.)
- "Aesop" and the Ambiguity of Clifford Simak's City (John Ower)
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