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We know better now, of course. But they still entrance us, the old page-turners from the glory days of American SF, half a century or so ago, when the world was full of futures we were never going to have. In the mid-1940s, when he began to publish the episodes that would be assembled as City in 1952, Clifford Simak, a Minneapolis-based journalist and author, could still carry us away with the dream that cars and pollution and even the great cities of the world – "Huddling Place", the title of one of these tales, is his own derisory term for them – would soon be brushed off the map by Progress, leaving nothing behind but tasteful exurbs filled with middle-class nuclear families living the good life, with fishing streams and greenswards sheltering each home from the stormy blast.
Fortunately, Simak soon gets past this demented vision of a near-future world saved by technological fixes, a dementia common then to SF writers and gurus and politicians alike, and launches into an astonishingly eventful narrative of the next 10,000 years as seen through the eyes of one family and the immortal robot Jenkins, and all told with a weird pastoral serenity that for a kid like me seemed near to godlike. In its course City touches on almost everything dear to 1940s SF, and to me remembering. Robots. Genetic Engineering. Space. Jupiter. Domed cities. Keeps. Hiveminds. Matter transmission. Telepathy. Parallel worlds. Paranormal empathy. Mutants. Supermen. It's all there, and, thanks to Simak's skilled hand at the wheel, it's all in place: suave, sibylline, swift. The whole is framed as a series of legends told by the uplifted Dogs who have replaced the human race, now gone for ever. They have been bred not to kill. At the end, only Jenkins remains to keep them from learning how to repeat history and die.
It all seemed immensely sad and wise then, but fun. It still does.
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Previews available in: English French
Subjects
Science fiction, genetic engineering, robots, space, domed cities, hiveminds, telepathy, parallel worlds, mutants, Fiction, short stories (single author), Fiction, general, American Science fiction, Lectures et morceaux choisis, Français (langue), Science-fiction, Littérature fantastique, Fiction, Fiction, science fiction, general, Fiction, science fiction, action & adventureShowing 7 featured editions. View all 43 editions?
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1
City
November 2004, Old Earth Books
Hardcover
in English
- Centennial edition
188296828X 9781882968282
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2
Demain les chiens
February 18, 2002, J'ai lu
Mass Market Paperback
in French
2290308595 9782290308592
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3 |
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4 |
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5 |
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6 |
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7
Demain Les Chiens
Publish date unknown, Editions 84
Mass Market Paperback
in French
2277123730 9782277123736
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Book Details
Table of Contents
Edition Notes
Originally published, New York , Gnome Press, 1952.
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- Created December 30, 2008
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April 17, 2024 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
December 1, 2023 | Edited by mheiman | Merge works |
October 9, 2012 | Edited by Lou Beauregard | added info, from: http://www.amazon.com/City-Clifford-D-Simak/dp/041706540X/ |
October 9, 2012 | Edited by Lou Beauregard | Added new cover |
December 30, 2008 | Created by ImportBot | Imported from Talis record |