Hugos Side-Step: City by Clifford D. Simak

City by Clifford D. Simak

As I read through the Hugo Award for Best Novel winners, I often supplement by reading significant books that were written by winning authors, but did not win themselves. So, after enjoying Way Station by Clifford Simak, I decided to pick up his City. City is a fix-up: it was originally published as a series of short stories chronicling a future history, mostly in Astounding, from 1944 to 1951. In 1952, Simak collected them in a book, adding introductions to each story written by some scholar from the far far future, making it into a work that exists in the future history. Simak wrote one extra City story in 1973, which was incorporated into editions of the book published in 1981 onward, including my 2011 Gollancz edition.

Collection originally published: 1952
Contents originally published: 1944-73
Acquired and read: October 2022

It's certainly of its era: I feel like a lot of sf writers in this period wrote series of short stories covering vast swathes of human history. In that sense, City reminded me of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and especially Cordwainer Smith. But what is different than those other future histories is the scope of City: while Asimov, Heinlein, and even Smith chronicle the history of humanity, Simak considers what comes after humanity... and then what comes after that. The only person who really matches Simak for scope is Wells. This is a series of vignettes, linked by some common characters and some related ones, that take us from the abandonment of the cities to the abandonment of the planet Earth itself.

Simak's futurism isn't always right, but the futurism isn't the point, so it doesn't matter. There's a lot to like here, but my favorite was "Hobbies," which I've already written about here. The story focuses on the dogs and robots left on Earth by humanity. Both were created to serve humanity; even though dogs have been raised to sapience, that's still what a dog is. There are also a last few humans. But all of these beings have no work to do—there is nothing left but the "hobbies" of the title. Simak is often praised for his pastoral style, and this thoughtful story is it at its moving best. The last couple stories point toward the fact that things never stop developing. Watch out for the ants!

I also really enjoyed the introductions to each story, written by the dog scholars of the far future attempting to put each story into its original context... but they are from so far in the future that they are not convinced any such creature as man actually existed. Surely he is just part of a creation myth? I'm often a sucker for this kind of faux apparatus, and this is a good example of it, extending the distance between the world of the text and ours.

I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume One