As I said earlier I quite liked the book but there was a lot I found awkward about it. How to regard the book in its reading I could only reflect on after finishing it, the outcome of which I will mention at the end of this lengthy ramble of mine (for those who get that far
).
I have mentioned that the storyline, for me, would make the basis of a good children's story. Some of the following may give some inkling as to why I feel that way. I have also mentioned that the prose gave me the sense of having the trappings of a news journalist's writing (Simak worked as a newspaper journalist, including in senior roles, while an author). I really can't put my finger on why that is but I have seen enough of both sides of news stories to know they bash out a story, the story has an agenda, and the writing is fast and loose with facts, has loose ends and facts are omitted, all such that the agenda is not compromised.
I mention below the propagandic nature of the book (i.e. the author has an has an agenda) and to me it is presented with loose ends, avoidance of scientific facts, and prose that seems a little bashed out rather than carefully crafted. But on the prose craftsmanship I cannot really put my finger on it and is likely, at least in part, a personal perception of mine. But, for example from memory, I found the story
Hobbies most awkward. The following, right at the get-go of
Hobbies, comes across to me as being from an immature writer (school essay?) or bashed out if from a mature one:
Feet pattered on the trail behind him and Shadow whizzed around the bush, slid to a stop alongside Ebenezer.
The wolf flicked his glare from the dog to the pint-sized robot, then back to the dog again. The yellow light of wildness slowly faded from his eyes.
I thought that the book was propagandic--most (all?) fiction is--and emotionally driven. One aspect of that is likely demonstrated by the following claimed to be said of
City by Simak (quoted in
Seekers of Tomorrow, Moskowitz):
"The series was written in a revulsion again mass killing and as a protest against war," states Simak.
"The series was also written as a sort of wish fulfillment. It was the creation of a world I thought there ought to be. It was filled with the gentleness and the kindness and the courage that I thought were needed in the world. And it was nostalgic because I was nostalgic for the old world we had lost and the world that would never be again—the world that had been wiped out on that day that a man with an umbrella came back to London and told the people there would be a thousand years of peace. I made the dogs and robots the kind of people I would like to live with. And the vital point is this: That they must be dogs or robots, because people were not that kind of folks."
It also seems that his lifestyle sympathies were strongly aligned with simple rural life rather than urban, and that he looked back favorably on his rural upbringing. This is mentioned in a number of web references but also Moskowitz quotes him:
Simak recalls. "We hunted and fished, we ran coons at night, we had a long string of noble squirrel and coon dogs. I sometimes think that despite the fact my boyhood spanned part of the first and second decades of the twentieth century that I actually lived in what amounted to the tail end of the pioneer days"... etc.
The deurbanization of humans and their failings in
City come, I believe, from these as emotional matters rather than their just being a convenience for the storyline.
I like science fiction to present the future of science in a manner that, while stretching the imagination, cannot be dismissed as fantasy or cannot be dismissed as being an extremely improbable development either from existing or new science. The author should demonstrate some knowledge of the science of their day. So just two of the things I noticed:
- Jupiter is a gas giant planet composed predominantly of gas (it may or may not have a small solid core) and is not of the type that could be trotted around on as
City presents. This was well known at the time of writing as Kepler produced his laws of planetary motion in the early 17th Century and it was trivial to work this out subsequent to that, and so it was proven that it could not be solid by the end of the that century (by Cassini, but Kepler actually did orbital studies of Jupiter's moons much earlier in the century so I would have thought he would have determined for himself Jupiter's density then).
- how all the animals get to be able to speak and have developed intelligences is not really explained (as far as I remember). For dogs a Webster intervention is mentioned and that the ability was then inherited. At the time of the writing of the stories evolution was well understood and known that major evolutionary leaps in a specific characteristic by itself do not occur in one bound. Squirrel ancestors, for example, if they ever come to be able to speak and to have developed intelligences, as they come to do so in
City, will no longer be squirrels as we know them to be (divine intervention aside) their other characteristics will have evolved too. I won't bother to get onto Simak's ants with their carts and chimneys!
While other common trappings of science fiction, such as time travel, may be regarded as improbable in current science, most physicists would have an open mind to some degree regarding that. The first example above is known physical fact. The second is also fact (apart from divine intervention). Both were well known at the time the stories were written.
The open ended logic of some of the science and leaps of believability, such as species as known to us now (e.g. a squirrel) becoming talkative and intelligent, is to me fantastical and more appropriate in, say, a childrens book, a dystopian novel (e.g.
Animal Farm), or fantasy.
A number of references mention the habit of Simak's work having a tendency to spill over into the fantasy side of the indeterminate border between what is and what is not science fiction. For me the cobblies in the
Hobbies and
Aesop stories also introduce a fantastical element to the book as these have a suggestive resemblance to mankinds' ghosts, apparitions, bogymen, etc.
With it being fast and loose with facts of science well known at the time of writing, its loose ends, its elements of fantasy, and its (to me) childrens' story dressed up with adult prose, I think I am most satisfied if I read the stories as being dreams. And that is maybe why I quite liked the book
.