![]() ![]() The story concerns the problem of unoccupied houses in the unnamed city where John J. The first story, “City,” is set about 50 years in the future of Simak’s writing in 1944 or so, and it projects the development of several technologies – helicopters, planes, hydroponics, atomics – into a future in which cars are obsolete, cities are unnecessary “huddling places”, and most people have chosen to live out in the country (since transportation is so easy and economical). The edition I’m reading, with pages references below, is the very handsome Old Earth Books edition of 2004. The book consists of eight stories plus an (later-written) epilogue. (It’s also listed in the recent 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die: A Life-Changing List, by former A Common Reader co-founder James Mustich, which I’ve just compiled this week at. It’s Simak’s most popular book along with his WAY STATION, published a decade later. ![]() It’s a well-known, enduring work, having won one of the very earliest awards for SF or fantasy, the International Fantasy Award, in 1953 ( ). The individual stories are prefaced by the latter, that is, tales of an ancient past from the point of view of the Dogs, telling stories about ‘Man,’ whom they think are mythical. ![]() Simak’s CITY, published in 1952 but composed of stories published in magazines from 1944 onward, is a story cycle that tells the future of humanity as it abandons cities for country estates and then moves off Earth to settle other planets, and in parallel the rise of an artificially created Dog civilization. ![]()
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