City (S.F. MASTERWORKS) Read online

  ‘A high-water mark in science fiction writing’

  Anthony Boucher

  ‘I never heard a bad word about him but only universal approval and approbation . . . I have tried to imitate his easy and uncluttered style. I think I have succeeded to an extent and that it has immeasurably improved my writing. He is the third of three people, then, who formed my writing career. John Campbell and Fred Pohl did it by precept, and Cliff Simak by example’

  Isaac Asimov

  ‘Without Simak, science fiction would have been without its most humane element, its most humane spokesman for the wisdom of the ordinary person and the value of life lived close to the land’

  James Gunn

  MASTERWORKS

  City

  CLIFFORD D. SIMAK

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise

  Title page

  INTRODUCTION

  EDITOR’S PREFACE

  NOTES ON THE FIRST TALE

  I City

  NOTES ON THE SECOND TALE

  II Huddling Place

  NOTES ON THE THIRD TALE

  III Census

  NOTES ON THE FOURTH TALE

  IV Desertion

  NOTES ON THE FIFTH TALE

  V Paradise

  NOTES ON THE SIXTH TALE

  VI Hobbies

  NOTES ON THE SEVENTH TALE

  VII Aesop

  NOTES ON THE EIGHTH TALE

  VIII The Simple Way

  IX Epilog

  About the Author

  Also by Clifford D. Simak

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  Clifford D. Simak, no more than a vaguely recognised name to many SF readers today, was among the giants of the Golden Age, in the glory days of John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction magazine. Still collecting honours in the 1980s, he was inaugurated as the third Grand Master of Science Fiction in 1977. Robert Heinlein said of him, famously: ‘The reader who does not like Simak stories, does not like science fiction at all’.

  The accolades will seem strange to a new reader of Simak’s quiet, ‘pastoral’ science fiction: where we find no thrusting rocketships, no worship of gleaming, futuristic technology, and very few fishbowl-helmeted spacemen. Yet arguably, Simak’s apotheosis of rural Wisconsin, between the two ‘World Wars’ of the twentieth century, stands, and always did, at the true heart of the Galactic Empire. Rocketships are the means. The dream is of escape – away from the restrictions and the crowded complexity of planet Earth, to some New World that often recalls the much-idealised pioneer West. Not the Wild West of the gunfights, but a hidden place where a man (female characters are rare in Simak’s fiction) may live at peace, in a homestead built by his own hands; where he may know every tree and meadow as a friend; government is a distant rumour, and his nearest neighbour’s smoke can barely be discerned on the horizon.

  Simak was a prolific writer, especially in the short form. Some of his novels, notably Way Station (1963) and Time Is The Simplest Thing (1961) have been more highly regarded, but City (1952, 1980), remains his best read work. The novel is a fix-up – a term coined by A. E Van Vogt for a collection of published stories using the same scenario, retrofitted into a single narrative. Eight of the tales in City were published in the short form in 1944-51. A ninth, written in 1973, was added to the revised 1980 edition, along with a retrospective foreword by the author. The overarching story charts the slow demise of Man, and the fortunes of a successor race of augmented, sentient Dogs. The scene is Simak’s beloved rural Wisconsin, with forays to a far-future Geneva, and to the surface (sic) of Jupiter. Links between the stories are provided by whimsical passages of ‘Doggish’ scholarship, discussing the authenticity of these folktales about the mythical, extinct creature called ‘Man’.

  The first tale, ‘City’ describes a future (the date is 1990) in which cities are emptying, and farming has become obsolete (replaced, somewhat improbably, by hydroponics). Modern conveniences mean Americans no longer need to ‘huddle together’ in the cities Simak personally detested: John Webster, unassuming hero, devises a solution for the human costs of this great change. In the second story, which, significantly, opens with a funeral, the mechanical robots who will serve both Dogs and Men have emerged. Space travel is commonplace, the Martians are well known, but since they deserted the cities Men have become reclusive. A surgeon descendant of the original John Webster fails, partly due to circumstance and partly paralysed by agoraphobia, to perform a crucial operation: and realises he may never leave his home again. In the third episode the first pet dogs are given speech, by another Webster surgeon, and by some means the surgical changes become heritable. The dogs, retaining the amiable character and trusting loyalty of family pets, are contrasted unfavourably with ‘Joe’ – one of the wayward ‘super-thinkers’, a naturally occurring human mutant strain, who might seem to be more promising successors. In the fourth episode a Man and his dog discover that humans, if they abandon their human bodies, can live in eternal bliss on Jupiter; in the fifth we return to the Webster dynasty, and another climactic ‘failure’ (this time, refusal to take a life). The remaining stories tell how the last of the Websters consigns himself to eternal sleep, in a vault under Geneva, with the rest of the last humans, while the Dogs – aided by robot servitors, and guided by Jenkins, the near-immortal robot butler who has served generations of Websters – establish a peaceable kingdom, where no animal (at least, nothing furred or feathered) will kill another, even for food. The Dogs, indifferent to outer space, discover an inner-space means of visiting and colonising other worlds. They battle with the sentient ants, arbitrarily created and then goaded into development by the mutant ‘Joe’ in episode three; are haunted by evil aliens from the inner space worlds, and tackle a resurgence of the killer instinct. Finally, when the Dogs have long deserted Earth, and even the Ants have vanished, Jenkins returns alone to pronounce Man’s epitaph.

  There’s more plot and incident to these stories than appears in a brief synopsis, but their lasting appeal is a tribute to Simak’s understated, laconic style, rather than his content. Like his close contemporary, Ray Bradbury, he is a master of mood and suggestion. In his foreword for the 1980 edition he explains that the City stories were written in deep disillusion, when the Second World War and the Atomic Bomb had destroyed his last hope in human nature: ‘I was trying to create a world in which I, and other disillusioned people, could, for a moment, take refuge . . .’. Never remotely interested in ‘technology’, or in factual ‘science’, he translates the fears and longings of his present day into timeless fable, with only the most perfunctory futuristic trappings. For a moment, in these tales, a Man sits in his armchair, his loving Dog at his knee, a glass of whisky at his elbow; pondering the lives of small creatures in the quiet woods around his homestead. Asking nothing, demanding no reward or second chance for the failed experiment of human civilisation; inventing nothing that isn’t already held in this moment, he spins a dream of blameless wonderland.

  Clifford Simak, though his stories appear so harmless, is possibly one of those fellows (wasn’t it a little dog?) who draws back the mystic curtain, and shows the world what the Wizard really looks like. Perhaps all of science fiction secretly lives in Simak’s moment, and is made of the same stuff as City – a paradoxical hybrid of nihilism and wish-fulfilment; tempered by a stoic acceptance of the cold equations.

  Among the many honours of his long career, he won three Hugos and a Nebula award (for ‘The Grotto of the Dancing Deer’ in 1980); he was awarded the International Fantasy Award for Science Fiction, for City, in 1953. He died in 1988.

  Gwyneth Jones

  EDITOR’S PREFACE

  These are the stories that th
e Dogs tell when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north. Then each family circle gathers at the hearthstone and the pups sit silently and listen and when the story’s done they ask many questions:

  ‘What is Man?’ they’ll ask.

  Or perhaps: ‘What is a city?’

  Or: ‘What is a war?’

  There is no positive answer to any of these questions. There are suppositions and there are theories and there are many educated guesses, but there are no answers.

  In the family circle, many a storyteller has been forced to fall back on the ancient explanation that it is nothing but a story, there is no such thing as a Man or city, that one does not search for truth in a simple tale, but takes it for its pleasure and lets it go at that.

  Explanations such as these, while they may do to answer pups, are no explanations. One does search for truth in such simple tales as these.

  The legend, consisting of eight tales, has been told for countless centuries. So far as can be determined, it has no historic starting point; the most minute study of it fails entirely to illustrate the stages of its development. There is no doubt that through many years of telling it has become stylized, but there is no way to trace the direction of its stylization.

  That it is ancient and, as some writers claim, that it may be of non-Doggish origin in part, is borne out by the abundance of jabberwocky which studs the tales – words and phrases (and worst of all, ideas) which have no meaning now and may have never had a meaning. Through telling and retelling, these words and phrases have become accepted, have been assigned, through context, a certain arbitrary value. But there is no way of knowing whether or not these arbitrary values even approximate the original meaning of the words.

  This edition of the tales will not attempt to enter into the many technical arguments concerning the existence or nonexistence of Man, of the puzzle of the city, of the several theories relating to war, or of the many other questions which arise to plague the student who would seek in the legend some evidence of its having roots in some basic or historic truth.

  The purpose of this edition is only to give the full, unexpurgated text of the tales as they finally stand. Chapter notes are utilized to point out the major points of speculation, but with no attempt at all to achieve conclusions. For those who wish some further understanding of the tales or of the many points of consideration which have arisen over them there are ample texts, written by Dogs of far greater competence than the present editor.

  Recent discovery of fragments of what originally must have been an extensive body of literature has been advanced as the latest argument which would attribute at least part of the legend to mythological (and controversial) Man rather than to the Dogs. But until it can be proved that Man did, in fact, exist, argument that the discovered fragments originated with Man can have but little point.

  Particularly significant or disturbing, depending upon the viewpoint that one takes, is the fact that the apparent title of the literary fragment is the same as the title of one of the tales in the legend here presented. The word itself, of course, is entirely meaningless.

  The first question, of course, is whether there ever was such a creature as Man. At the moment, in the absence of positive evidence, the sober consensus must be that there was not, that Man, as presented in the legend, is a figment of folklore invention. Man may have risen in the early days of Doggish culture as an imaginary being, a sort of racial god, on which the Dogs might call for help, to which they might retire for comfort.

  Despite these sober conclusions, however, there are those who see in Man an actual elder god, a visitor from some mystic land or dimensions, who came and stayed awhile and helped and then passed on to the place from which he came.

  There still are others who believe that Man and Dog may have risen together as two co-operating animals, may have been complementary in the development of a culture, but that at some distant point in time they reached the parting of the ways.

  Of all the disturbing factors in the tales (and they are many) the most disturbing is the suggestion of reverence which is accorded Man. It is hard for the average reader to accept this reverence as mere story-telling. It goes far beyond the perfunctory worship of a tribal god; one almost instinctively feels that it must be deep-rooted in some now forgotten belief or rite involving the pre-history of our race.

  There is little hope now, of course, that any of the many areas of controversy which revolve about the legend ever will be settled.

  Here, then, are the tales, to be read as you see fit – for pleasure only, for some sign of historical significance, for some hint of hidden meaning. Our best advice to the average reader: Don’t take them too much to heart, for complete confusion, if not madness, lurks along the road.

  NOTES ON THE FIRST TALE

  There is no doubt that, of all the tales, the first is the most difficult for the casual reader. Not only is its nomenclature trying, but its logic and its ideas seem, at first reading, to be entirely alien. This may be because in this story and the next a Dog plays no part, is not even mentioned. From the opening paragraph in this first tale the reader is pitchforked into an utterly strange situation, with equally strange characters to act out its solution. This much may be said for the tale, however – by the time one has laboured his way through it the rest of the tales, by comparison, seem almost homey.

  Overriding the entire tale is the concept of the city. While there is no complete understanding of what a city might be, or why it should be, it is generally agreed that it must have been a small area accommodating and supporting a large number of residents. Some of the reasons for its existence are superficially explained in text, but Bounce, who has devoted a lifetime to the study of the tales, is convinced that the explanation is no more than the clever improvisations of an ancient storyteller to support an impossible concept. Most students of the tales agree with Bounce that the reasons as given in the tale do not square with logic and some, Rover among them, have suspected that here we may have an ancient satire, of which the significance has been lost.

  Most authorities in economics and sociology regard such an organization as a city an impossible structure, not only from the economic standpoint, but from the sociological and psychological as well. No creature of the highly nervous structure necessary to develop a culture, they point out, would be able to survive within such restricted limits. The result, if it were tried, these authorities say, would lead to mass neuroticism which in a short period of time would destroy the very culture which had built the city.

  Rover believes that in the first tale we are dealing with almost pure myth and that as a result no situation or statement can be accepted at face value, that the entire tale must be filled with a symbolism to which the key has long been lost. Puzzling, however, is the fact that if it is a myth-concept, and nothing more, that the form by now should not have rounded itself into the symbolic concepts which are the hallmark of the myth. In the tale there is for the average reader little that can be tagged as myth-content. The tale itself is perhaps the most angular of the lot – raw-boned and slung together, with none of the touches of finer sentiment and lofty ideals which are found in the rest of the legend.

  The language of the tale is particularly baffling. Phrases such as the classic ‘dadburn the kid’ have puzzled semanticists for many centuries and there is to-day no closer approach to what many of the words and phrases mean than there was when students first came to pay some serious attention to the legend.

  The terminology for Man has been fairly well worked out, however. The plural for this mythical race is men, the racial designation is human, the females are women or wives (two terms which may at one time have had a finer shade of meaning, but which now must be regarded as synonymous), the pups are children. A male pup is a boy. A female pup a girl.

  Aside from the concept of the city, another concept which the reader will find entirely at odds with his way of life and which may violate his very thinking, is the idea of war and of ki
lling. Killing is a process, usually involving violence, by which one living thing ends the life of another living thing. War, it would appear, was mass killing carried out on a scale which is inconceivable.

  Rover, in his study of the legend, is convinced that the tales are much more primitive than is generally supposed, since it is his contention that such concepts as war and killing could never come out of our present culture, that they must stem from some era of savagery of which there exists no record.

  Tige, who is almost alone in his belief that the tales are based on actual history and that the race of Man did exist in the primordial days of the Dogs’ beginning, contends that this first tale is the story of the actual breakdown of Man’s culture. He believes that the tale as we know it to-day may be a mere shadow of some greater tale, a gigantic epic which at one time may have measured fully as large or larger than to-day’s entire body of the legend. It does not seem possible, he writes, that so great an event as the collapse of a mighty mechanical civilization could have been condensed by the tale’s contemporaries into so small a compass as the present tale. What we have here, says Tige, is only one of many tales which told the entire story and that the one which does remain to us may be no more than a minor one.

  I

  City

  Gramp Stevens sat in a lawn chair, watching the mower at work, feeling the warm, soft sunshine seep into his bones. The mower reached the edge of the lawn, clucked to itself like a contented hen, made a neat turn and trundled down another swath. The bag holding the clippings bulged.

  Suddenly the mower stopped and clicked excitedly. A panel in its side snapped open and a cranelike arm reached out. Grasping steel fingers fished around in the grass, came up triumphantly with a stone clutched tightly, dropped the stone into a small container, disappeared back into the panel again. The lawn mower gurgled, purred on again, following its swath.