I had once played the lead in L’Aiglon and I had played Caesar in the only two plays about him worthy of the name. But to play such a role in life — well, it is enough to make one understand how a man could go to the guillotine in another man’s place — just for the chance to play, even for a few moments, the ultimately exacting role, in order to create the supreme, the perfect, work of art.

• Title: Double Star
• Author: Robert A. Heinlein
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Year: 1956

Before Stranger in a Strange Land, before Starship Troopers, and before The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, there was Double Star, Heinlein’s first, and least known, Hugo Award wining novel. It isn’t a big idea novel, you aren’t going to see people throwing around words they don’t understand, like ‘fascist,’ when they talk about it. In a way, Double Star — which has nothing to do with binary star systems, if you were thinking it did — is sort of a hybrid of a Heinlein juvenile and one of his idea books. It’s short and uncomplicated, fast-paced and fun, but also takes its central message seriously and presents us with one of Heinlein’s most memorable characters.

Lorenzo Smythe — or Larry Smith if you check his birth certificate — is an actor. As ‘The Great Lorenzo’ he’s a one man stock company, a “Pantomimist and Mimicry Artist Extraordinary.” He’s also flat broke and completely full of himself. An apparently chance encounter with a spacer, man-of-action Captain Dak Broadbent, changes all that and Larry — excuse me, The Great Lorenzo — finds himself on the way to Mars and in the midst of the acting challenge of a lifetime.

On Mars, Lorenzo’s assignment is to perfectly mimic one of the most famous political figures in the Solar Empire, a man named John Joseph Bonforte, head of the Loyal Opposition to His Majesty’s Government and leader of the Expansionist Party. The real Bonforte, in a plot reminiscent of The Prisoner of Zenda, has been kidnapped by his political enemies — removed from action so that he cannot attend a crucial ceremony that would see him adopted into a Martian nest.

I get a bit of sympathetic nostalgia about science fiction of this era, the time when you could have Martians and Venusians (or, Venerians as Heinlein would have them) rubbing shoulders with spacers from earth, confident men who steered their atomic rockets between the planets with naught but a slide rule to guide them. It was a different time, and a different aesthetic, and Double Star reflects it. It was also a very different time politically and socially, and science fiction was just starting to move beyond its ray-guns and rockets roots to take on social and political issues — something Heinlein would become famous (or infamous) for.

And Double Star does play with some of these issues, most notably racism. Lorenzo hates Martians, he’s scared of them, but as Bonforte he must deal closely with them. After a bit of hypnotic conditioning he’s able to suppress his fear — and that’s enough for him to start to see the Martians for the extraordinary beings they are, rather than just obsess about their otherness. Racism could be seen as one of the primary differences between Bonforte’s party and that of his rivals, the Humanity Party, who want to exclude non-human races from mankind’s empire. All of this is fairly casually laid into the story, which isn’t anything like as political as, say, Starship Troopers, but it’s a clear and unambiguous denouncement of racism written in a time prior to the Civil Rights movement.

But the real strength of the story lies in its central character, who also narrates. At first glance Lorenzo doesn’t seem anything like the typical Heinlein Competent Man protagonist — he’s fussy, relatively cowardly, extremely arrogant, not very practical, shallow, immature, and xenophobic. But as an actor, mimic, and student of human nature, he’s a genius, and Heinlein paints a compelling, if not exactly believable, picture of Lorenzo’s transformation into a perfect copy of Bonforte. The various behavioral minutia Lorenzo adopts and the schemes of his handlers to avoid detection all make for an entertaining read.

What was supposed to turn into a brief stint as Bonforte’s replacement becomes a great deal longer, due to injuries the real Bonforte suffered at the hands of his kidnappers. And here is the real transformation of Lorenzo’s — and the true heart of the book — because the mimic becomes the subject. Lorenzo tries on another’s skin as a challenge and retains it as a duty — a concept he could only have learned when he stopped being Lorenzo. Double Star is really about taking responsibility as a fully-fledged adult, as our feckless and selfish narrator transforms into a a genuinely dedicated, and even wise, leader of the people. It’s all done so skillfully in-between the breathless pace of events that it has a way of sneaking up on the reader, just as it did on Lorenzo.

Double Star is a fun and undemanding book that prefigures Heinlein’s great idea novels, but itself doesn’t contain anything especially controversial. Even by today’s PC standards, Double Star comes across more as quaint than offensive; such as in the case of the shrinking violet of a female lead, Bonforte’s love-struck and childlike secretary, who is sketched with such innocence it’s hard to take her emptiness seriously. The book is certainly the product of the fifties, with some dated idioms, Leave It To Beaver style sexual politics, black-and-white morality, and some notions about the future that will of course appear dated today. But it holds up despite all this, and is worth reading for the quirky narrator and Heinlein’s phenomenal ability to tell a story.

• Double Star at Amazon
• A Heinlein resource site

At the moment, all was triumph. Red-splashed, panting, in scorched and dinted armor, Sir Roger de Tourneville rode a weary horse back to the main fortress. After him came the lancers, archers, yeomen — ragged, battered, shoulders slumped with exhaustion. But the Te Deum was on their lips, rising beneath the strange constellations that twinkled forth, and their banners flew bravely against the sky.

It was wonderful to be an Englishman.

• Title: The High Crusade
• Author: Poul Anderson
• Genre: Space Opera/Historical Adventure
• Year: 1960

The year is 1345; the place is the village of Ansby, Lincolnshire, England, Earth. A great host is being assembled under Sir Roger Baron de Tourneville in preparation for a campaign in France as part of the ongoing conflict that would come to be known as the Hundred Years War. The army features knights and men-at-arms and longbowmen and the various other components of a Medieval host — but it certainly doesn’t have anything to match the likes of the Wersgorix. Alien invaders, they fall from the sky in the midst of Ansby in an enormous chrome ship bristling with weapons. They have anti-gravity, beam cannons, force screens, flame guns, sophisticated communications and mapping technologies and the will to use them — for the Wersgorix are the overlords of an enormous galactic empire that makes a habit of finding new worlds, exterminating or enslaving their populations, and installing new Wersgor masters in their place. The Wersgor emerge from their ship, demonstrate their overwhelming power, and deliver their ultimatum to the assembled primitives of Earth in the form of the army of Sir Roger.

Sir Roger orders a charge — and the ‘assembled primitives’ butcher the shocked crew of the Wersgor scout ship and capture it for themselves.

Thus begins The High Crusade. Slim, fast-paced, fun and compelling in equal amounts, it’s the kind of book people used to write before they got so damn serious and decided to milk every idea for 500 pages. And make no mistake, the premise of The High Crusade is very milk-able, being both instantly understandable and wide-open for exploration. But Anderson keeps his story tight, throwing off clever extrapolations of his ‘Middle Ages meets Space Opera’ idea like sparks off a grinding wheel all, while keeping his story moving at a breakneck pace along the edge of its well-honed plot. Originally written for John W. Campbell’s Astounding, the story bears all the hallmarks of the best magazine fiction of the era, and more’s the pity that such skills are no longer in evidence in popular fiction.

And it’s a shame no one can deliver a couched lance charge from horseback like they could in the fourteenth century, either, because such skills just might save us from alien invasion one day. Sir Roger and his victorious host soon decide to make the best of the ‘demonic’ vessel that has fallen into their hands and, with the aid of a Wersgor prisoner named Branithar, they pack the entire village along with the army into the ship and decide to go to France and win the war — but only as their first stop on the way to liberating the Holy Land. But it is a very different Crusade that they eventually undertake, as Branithar sets the ship’s autopilot for the nearest Wersgor colony where, doubtless, Sir Roger and his fellows will learn what a fluke their success against the Wersgorix really was.

Only, of course, Sir Roger’s army takes that place over too, and keeps on going. Anderson progressively increases the stakes of the conflict over the course of The High Crusade, and never fails to deliver a solution both novel and logical at every turn. The Wersgorix weaknesses go beyond their having forgotten how to fight in close quarters, and the humans find they cannot rely purely on the tried-and-true methods with which they won their initial success. Here is the heart of the book, the ingenious ways these men of the Middle Ages adapt what they know to fighting an enemy superior to them in nearly every category. So we get to read about delightful juxtapositions such as a trebuchet — its all-wooden construction undetectable by Wersgor scanners — flinging nuclear shells, or volleys of arrows bringing down thin-skinned aircraft protected only by anti-beam forcefields, or knights in spacesuits boarding enemy vessels with axe and sword and longbowmen loosing their shafts within the vacuum of space.

But perhaps the best weapon the humans have is, as Sir Roger terms it, ‘knavery.’ Reared in the complicated and cut-throat politics of Medieval Europe, negotiations amongst the Wersgor and their neighbors seems like child’s play. Sir Roger out-foxes, out-bluffs, and out-maneuvers the Wersgor at every turn, and the aliens cannot fathom if the humans are some sort of hyper-advanced race that have come out of nowhere, or mad barbarians from the fringe of their empire. The trouble the Wersgor have deciphering human activity — is Sir Roger’s insistence of only speaking with someone suitably ‘well-born’ an indication that his people practice sophisticated genetic engineering? And is the ritual chanting the humans begin their negotiations with, something called the ‘Lord’s Prayer,’ really some sort of psycho-somatic neural trigger that increases their brain functions?

The High Crusade, as should be obvious by now, is a light, humorous book, but it isn’t just about a punch line. Anderson does an excellent job of capturing a Medieval mindset and manages to be both respectful and playful in doing so. The voice of Brother Parvus, the book’s narrator, is also well-done, being sufficiently evocative of the norms of Medieval expression to suggest a kind of authenticity, while remaining pulpishly readable. It all adds up to an irresistible combination of against-the-odds adventure and culture-clash hilarity that makes The High Crusade one of the undoubted classics of pulp science fiction.

• The High Crusade at Amazon

He felt no regrets as the work of a lifetime was swept away. He had labored to take man to the stars, and, in the moment of success, the stars — the aloof, indifferent stars — had come to him. This was the moment when history held its breath, and the present sheared asunder from the past as an iceberg splits from its frozen, parent cliffs, and goes sailing out to sea in lonely pride. All that the past ages had achieved was as nothing now . . . The human race was no longer alone.

• Title: Childhood’s End
• Author: Arthur C. Clarke
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Year: 1953

And so the Overlords arrive to put the human house in order: no more war, no more poverty, no more space flight. The alien visitors are mysterious, they do not allow themselves to be seen and remain within their great ships parked above earth’s major cities, instead communicating their directives through broadcasts. But they are benign, paternal, and they share with us their knowledge and their power and lift humankind out of the competition of nations and factions and into a technological utopia. But why? And at what price?

Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End is one of the core canonical works of classic science fiction; it’s on every must-read list and on the shelves of every serious fan of the genre. And for good reason. Despite the initial situation, this is not a novel of first contact (or, not primarily about first contact), instead it tells a story on a grander, cosmological scale; the story of humanity’s future, its extinction and rebirth. It’s a novel of ideas, and difficult to review without ruining much of the pleasant surprises and logical revelations that lend this relatively simple story a timeless resonance.

Childhood’s End is divided in three main sections, each advancing into the future by several decades. The first, ‘Earth and the Overlords,’ feels much like a classic short story of the time. It centers on the difficulties of the period immediately after the Overlords’ arrival, perhaps sometime in the then near future of the 1970s or 80s. The UN Secretary General, who has become the Overlord’s main instrument of policy on Earth, finds himself at odds with an anti-Overlord organization called the Freedom League, an extremest wing of which intends to resort to terrorism to resist the invader’s plans for humanity. The doubts of large segments of the population are mirrored to some extent by the Secretary General himself, who is bothered in particular by the Overlord’s unwillingness to show themselves.

This section raises the core theme of the book, whether or not humanity can stand on its own, and whether it is itself an adult species, or currently undergoing a troubled adolescence. The Overlords, and Clarke, are certain the later notion is the truth, though not without qualifications or sympathy. By the end of ‘The Earth and the Overlords,’ the absolute coercive power of the Earth’s masters is established, and humanity’s new direction is underway.

Fast-forward fifty years to ‘The Golden Age,’ and to a utopian, unified earth; free of want, of struggle, and even the need to work. Religion and nationalism are dead, but so is science, art, and culture. Humanity has it too easy under its new masters, and life has become safely stagnant. As one of Clarke’s characters, the inhabitant of a ‘back to basics’ colony, says:

We’ve no hostility towards the Overlords: we simply want to be left alone to go our own way. When they destroyed the old nations and the way of life man had known since the beginning of history, they swept away many good things with the bad. The world’s now placid, featureless, and culturally dead: nothing really new has been created since the Overlords came. The reason’s obvious. There is nothing left to struggle for, and there are too many distractions and entertainments. Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? . . . No wonder the people are becoming passive sponges, absorbing but never creating. Did you know the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day?

According to the A. C. Nielsen Co., the average American of today watches four hours a day and, when you factor in internet and other digital media, Clarke’s conclusion that “Soon people won’t be living their own lives any more” has a contemporary resonance, and suggests that, perhaps, we really are living in a science fiction world.

While Clarke’s golden age has plenty of familiar elements — the change in sexual mores from the development of a birth control pill and paternity testing are just one small, concrete example of the changes Clarke foresees in this world of fifty or a hundred years in his future — it also has flying cars, deep sea colonies, and several alien technologies such as a viewer that lets one watch past events. And all of this is fascinating reading, told as it is with logic and inventiveness while raising even greater mysterious about the Overlord’s mission, and ultimate cosmic truths that remain hidden just beneath the surface of things.

While there are a few characters to ground the plot (the most interesting of which is a young astronomer who decides to do something about pursuing his dream of the stars despite the Overlord ban), Childhood’s End is really about the future sweep of human history as a whole. By the time of ‘The Last Generation,’ something radical has occurred to transform humanity out of all recognition. It is the thing the Overlords have been waiting for, what they saved us from ourselves to realize. And it is, quite frankly, chilling to contemplate, and in scale it dwarfs all our human notions of existence. Clarke achieves a real sense of cosmic sweep here, of a minute intelligence encountering the vastly inconceivable truths of space and time.

In the end, one wonders just how much of Childhood’s End is Clarke truly advocating, and how much has just grown from the logic of the story. Clarke does have the ability to be coolly dispassionate, almost ruthless, when focusing on the big picture, and I do not deny his sincerity when he suggests that humankind will destroy itself if it remains unchecked. But it is also apparent that he keenly feels the loss to human society when it undergoes its several transformations over the course of the novel. I think the answer must be that Clarke, like any good writer, embodies both notions and sees the positives and negatives inherent in each — and in the end goes where the story dictates. What the reader must decided is, does Childhood’s End represent mankind’s apotheosis, or apocalypse?

But this was a book written over fifty years ago, and Clarke’s opinions on certain aspects of it have changed over time. One surprising element for fans of Clarke is that various supernatural elements, such as ghosts and psychic abilities, are given some credence and are actually integral to the direction of the plot. Clarke himself has said that he no longer agrees with his earlier notions of such phenomena, but that doesn’t diminish the impact of the novel.

It has been said that science fiction is the literature of ideas, and also that its central tenet is change. Childhood’s End embodies both notions perfectly, and is one of the defining works from one of the genre’s master storytellers.

• Childhood’s End at Amazon
• An Arthur C. Clarke website

The station, at this hour, is practically deserted. But in a moment I hear the wailing of onrushing wheels, metal on metal, and simultaneously I pick up the blasting impact of a phalanx of minds all rushing toward me at once out of the north, packed aboard the five or six cars of the oncoming train. The compressed souls of those passengers form a single inchoate mass, pressing insistently against me. They quiver like trembling jellylike bites of plankton squeezed brutally together in some oceanographer’s net, creating one complex organism in which the separate identities of all are lost. As the train glides into the station I am able to pick up isolated blurts and squeaks of discrete selfhood: a fierce jab of desire, a squawk of hatred, a pang of regret, a sudden purposeful inner mumbling, rising from the confusing totality the way odd little scraps and stabs of melody rise from the murky orchestral smear of a Mahler symphony. The power is deceptively strong in me today. . . . But I’m not deceived into thinking that the decline in my ability has been checked. . . . When one knows that something is dying inside one, one learns not to put much trust in the random vitalities of the fleeting moment. Today the power is strong yet tomorrow I may hear nothing but distant tantalizing murmurs.

• Title: Dying Inside
• Author: Robert Silverberg
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Year: 1972

David Selig is a freak, David Selig is a superman. He reads minds, absolutely and effortlessly and at great distance and with the kind of penetrative thoroughness that ensures he knows more about you than you do. David Selig is a wretch, David Selig is a failure. Sampling a thousand vicarious lives, he’s never learned to live his own. Ransacking minds, he’s never been alone. But as Selig creeps past forty the gift is fading, and Dying Inside is his account of the loss of this amazing and inexplicable part of himself.

Dying Inside is rightly hailed as one of Silverberg’s best novels, and it is only one of a handful of very strong offerings that comprised the second phase of Silverberg’s career, when the prolific but workmanlike writer of adventure SF suddenly switched gears to produce psychologically thoughtful New Wave specfic novels such as Thorns, Hawksbill Station, and The Book of Skulls. Dying Inside was published the same year as The Book of Skulls, and both are psychological novels that take place in the modern America of their time. Both novels are Silverberg’s closest foray into the world of contemporary literature, with Dying Inside as perhaps the more perfectly integrated hybrid of SF and literary techniques.

The novel is told in the first person by Selig, whose narrative voice bounces between the poles of cynical-yet-flippant fatalism, clinical detachment, and bleak despair. That alone is reason enough to read this novel as Silverberg crafts a completely authentic voice, the thoughts of a character at once insufferable and tragically vulnerable. Selig is a weak and frightened man, but he is a highly educated and erudite one, and the continual seasoning of his story with high culture references only reinforces how divided and powerless his character is — for all his quoting of Eliot or Shakespeare or Aldous Huxley, it is apparent that Selig himself is a man without answers. Just as his telepathic power provides his every justification and sense of self, Selig’s knowledge, and in particular his store of poetry, is often flung up as a kind of shield, as a way of expressing that which he cannot even begin to articulate. All of this serves as a distancing device, highlighting Selig’s fundamental problem — that he does not know himself, does not know what he is outside of his vanishing gift.

Which is precisely why a novel about a telepath can be an expression of normal human truths. Selig has squandered his power; as he enters middle age he is alone, barely scraping by on what he makes ghosting term papers for college students at his old alma mater. Here his telepathy is of some use, as he probes the minds of his clients to establish the best and most believable manner to counterfeit their writing. Again, this is Selig living another’s life, using both his power and his old collection of term papers to squeak by. But his power is deserting him, and some days it’s not there at all. Dying Inside address this notion of squandered potential profoundly, and does so not as a cautionary tale, but as an enlargement on the tragedy of the human condition.

Dying Inside is a slim volume, much of which is told as episodes from David Selig’s past. We glimpse his precocious yet miserable childhood, where the obvious joys of a mindreading child are coupled with the lost innocence of contact with so many tired adult minds. Selig’s adopted sister is the only link he preserves with this past, and their relationship — based on her full knowledge of what he is — is a cornerstone of the book, as they gradually learn to accept one another. Two of Selig’s important past relationships with women are shown, both sabotaged because of his gift, though each in a very different way. And Nyquist, the only other telepath Selig has ever met, looms over sections of the book like an anti-Selig — a man who uses his telepathy as a tool to get what he wants and suffers not a jot for it. All of these past episodes in Selig’s life construct a character that is knowable to the reader despite his unthinkable power, and it is apparent that Selig’s plight is not alien to our own experience.

In the end, the inevitable does occur — as was necessary from page one. Selig’s apotheosis is an especially beautiful one, as Silverberg takes the character to the lowest depths of humiliation and then truly shows the reader just what it is that Selig will be missing for, as Selig uses his power one last time to see into the mind of a man that pities and despises him with the utmost contempt, he is transported with a profound and ecstatic joy. For it’s not those surface thoughts that matter, it never was, it was the rapture of true togethernesses, of true knowing, that happened whenever David Selig linked his mind with the mind of another. Beyond the powerlessness and need to redefine himself, it’s the aloneness that Selig feared. The aloneness we all must face.

Dying Inside is a book that takes the tragic rather than the triumphant view, though it is not without a note of hope. It is also about time, about growing old with the promise of youth unfulfilled, about the weight of potential and how it alone can be enough to crush or paralyze a person. Ultimately, too, it’s about coming to terms, about accepting what cannot be changed, about living the life we have and being who we must. It is unquestionably a classic, a must-read from one of SF’s Grandmasters.

• Dying Inside at Amazon
• The Quasi-Official Robert Silverberg website

The house stood on the hilltop, a huddled structure that had taken root and crouched close against the earth. So old that it was the color of the things around it, of grass and flowers and trees, of sky and wind and weather. A house built by men who loved it and the surrounding acres even as the dogs now loved them. Built and lived in and died in by a legendary family that had left a meteoric trail across centuries of time. Men who lent their shadows to the stories that were told around the blazing fireplace of stormy nights when the wind sucked along the eaves.

• Title: City
• Author: Clifford D. Simak
• Genre: Science Fiction
• Year: 1952 (1980)

City has the well-deserved reputation of a classic, Clifford D. Simak’s beautifully-written future history rivals anything produced in science fiction’s Golden Age in sheer scope and originality of vision. You won’t see a book like this today, a third of the size of a modern fat fantasy yet somehow managing to create a sense of vastness as the story unfolds over tens of thousands of years — proof that there is more than one way to craft an epic. City is an episodic novel built from a series of linked stories originally published separately in the forties (though the final story, ‘Epilog,’ was not written until the seventies and the book did not achieve its present shape until 1980), and each story begins with a connecting explanatory note examining the history and obscure terminology in the tale, written by a learned Dog.

That’s right, a Dog. Through hints and context clues the reader soon realizes these nine tales of a rapidly changing human society survive only as puzzling folk myths amongst a civilization that has cause to wonder if mankind ever really existed at all, or if that species is as fictional as as the other strange and un-Doggish concepts present in the stories, such as spaceflight, warfare, and cities. In fact the first story in City, from which the whole cycle takes its name, is the most problematical for the Dogs, so full of strange concepts to be almost meaningless.

To us, of course, it is just the opposite — the further into the future the stories in City stretch, the genuinely stranger they become, until they begin to resemble myths of the distant past, in fact. The first story takes place in the shell of a city in the wake of a mass migration of humanity to the countryside — a perfect storm of cheap atomic energy, private air transport, and a hydroponics revolution have dramatically altered the social fabric of mankind. Cities have become an anachronism, anyone of average means can now own a virtual mansion in the middle of a large acreage and trust to perfect communication and the family helicopter to bridge the distance to work and recreation. Written in 1946, the short story City anticipates the world of 1990 as a sort of post-singularity future — an atomic singularity as envisioned by the World War II generation.

Though this is the last time a city has any importance to the plot of the book (with a very minor exception), the first story establishes the themes of the cycle. Firstly, we are introduced to the Webster family, members of which are central to many of the stories in the book (and are arguably the most important humans ever to live — as it was a Webster that first altered Dogs and taught them speech and culture), secondly the theme of decay and decline takes center stage and never really lets go. Change is palpable in City, and always there’s a feeling like a great winding-down of days, a slow approaching doom, and the flight of man from the cities and the death of his communal instincts is essentially the first step on a long road to annihilation. But always it is social change that is the motive force; from the first story onward technology is an important tool but never the decisive force, indeed the most important of all technologies in the book is itself a kind of philosophy, a thing that alters the way humanity understands itself. This is a future history that puts the long sweep of societal change in the driver’s seat.

With each generation of Websters we are introduced to more and greater changes — and to an unexpected apocalypse of ingenious devising. Eventually, Man is reduced in importance, his successors the Dogs, the Robots, and the Mutants each pursue their own ideas of civilization. Only one figure really recalls the enormous scope of history that runs through these stories, and that is Jenkins, a robot servant of the Websters who becomes a mentor to the Dogs and teaches and instructs them. Once free completely of the influence of man, the Dogs develop their own perceptions and philosophies and create a pacifistic animal paradise, in which the animals of the earth live in harmony. When Man is reintroduced into this idyll, so too comes murder. When Jenkins is confronted with the reinvention of the bow and arrow, he muses on the nature of mankind:

It’s just a bow and arrow, but it’s not a laughing matter. It might have been at one time, but history takes the laugh out of many things. If the arrow is a joke, so is the atom bomb, so is the sweep of disease-laden dust that wipes out whole cities, so is the screaming rocket that arcs and falls ten thousand miles away and kills a million people.

Jenkins arrives at a solution, and in the end the tiny remnant of mankind have come full circle, and it is they that are the children in need of a father, rather than the Dogs. The later stories in City most contrast the world of Man and the world of the Dogs, but Simak does not necessarily take the easy road of condemnation. Mankind is violent, inherently dangerous, but it is shown that there are things he can do to survive that neither Dog nor Robot can accomplish, even in his most primitive state. What Jenkins ponders, and Simak poses, is whether or not such powers are worth the price they inevitably demand in payment. Jenkins’ answer is a firm ‘no.’

City is a haunting book, a far vision of a strange future that packs more sense of wonder than any space opera. It’s also a thoughtful book, and perhaps a pessimistic one, but one that looks at the future sweep of society in such a compellingly original way that it’s impossible to forget. Like Asimov’s Foundation, Simak plays with the building blocks of history to create a chain of interlocking narratives, each building logically from the last. But Simak’s sensibilities are perhaps closer to Le Guin’s, and his prose more akin to Bradbury’s, than to any of his contemporaries writing on the hard SF end of the spectrum. Regardless of just how you slice it, City is an indispensable classic of the genre that, though written at a time when many loudly prophesied apocalypse in a rain of atom bombs, chose to eschew the bang and embrace the whimper.

• City at Amazon
• A Clifford D. Simak fan site