City by Clifford Simak

After reading the depressing Blood Music and Childhood's End, I decided to read something more light hearted. I decided to read City because I thought it would be a cute story about a future where there were no more humans and Dogs were the major sentient creatures. Well, it ended up being more like an obituary to humanity. 

Thousands of years in the future, dogs will have inherited the earth with their robot helpers. Dog researchers are debating whether or not humans ever existed. Some use folklore, others research old stories and manuscripts found about when men lived on earth. They published the stories with their notes in between. 

Each of the stories follows the Webster family through thousands of years of history. Each story centers on an individual Webster family member dealing with the slow evolution of mankind. Humans slowly walk away from civilization to the point that they choose to no longer live as humans. Sometimes the Websters become so anxious that they can't even leave their homes. Sometimes they react with anger and violence. They always have their loyal robot companion, Jenkins by their side. Jenkins sees the rest of the history of the Earth, how a Webster uplifted dogs and gave them their voice. He saw how the dogs slowly took over the Earth and how different they thought from men. Would the dogs lead the world forever? How are their mistakes different from man's?

This book cover spoils the ending

As I read, I thought about the Disney movie Zootopia and how this book can explain how that type of civilization could be possible. It is written more intelligently than Zootopia, of course. A world where non-humans ruled wouldn't look like a New York City and an animal world wouldn't have the same social issues as the human world.  (slight spoiler) If mankind uplifted one animal, would they want to uplift all animals and make a law not to eat or kill one another, creating a paradise? 

I love these book covers

In one of the stories, there are a few hundred humans living in the Doggie paradisical glory. It is a Cain and Abel type of story where man brings back violence to the Earth and the robot Jenkins must make a difficult decision on what to do with mankind. That was the darkest part of the book for me. 

City, by Simak, is a fix up novel published in 1952 made up of several short stories that Simak began writing in the early 1940's. He saw the beginning of the atomic age and began to question whether or not humans even deserve the Earth. I could sense disappointment in the human race throughout the book. Each story is further and further from our known civilization into space, into another step in human evolution, even to other dimensions which the dogs call "cobblies". This is an epic book that has aged well. 

S for Superior. If you have Kindle Unlimited, you can read City for free.