City - BookWyrm.it

Brossura, 267 pagine

lingua English

Pubblicato il 22 Dicembre 1991 da Macmillan.

ISBN:: 978-0-02-025391-4

(1 recensione)

> 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 …

Comment by John Clute:

> 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.

13 edizioni

AvonVilla@ramblingreaders.org ha recensito City di Clifford D. Simak

Strange and compelling, brimming with goodness and compassion

4 stelle

A strange future history of life on earth and beyond, explicitly presented as a collection of myths. One of them is titled "Aesop", tempting you to think of it as a fable. But that's a deception. There is no simple moral to these stories. Although it's a short book, there's a lot to digest, and I will probably need a bit of time to order my thoughts about it.

A consistent line running through the tales is the way technological progress ends up being a dead end. First it's the demise of the city. Then there's the emergence of a promising new philosophy, Juwainism. It promotes empathy, but the goal of humanity is to harness it to accelerate development and progress. That goal fails, and when Juwainism finally takes hold, it has the opposite effect.

After humans have deserted the earth, or forsaken their own cursed humanity, a super-evolved society …

A strange future history of life on earth and beyond, explicitly presented as a collection of myths. One of them is titled "Aesop", tempting you to think of it as a fable. But that's a deception. There is no simple moral to these stories. Although it's a short book, there's a lot to digest, and I will probably need a bit of time to order my thoughts about it.

A consistent line running through the tales is the way technological progress ends up being a dead end. First it's the demise of the city. Then there's the emergence of a promising new philosophy, Juwainism. It promotes empathy, but the goal of humanity is to harness it to accelerate development and progress. That goal fails, and when Juwainism finally takes hold, it has the opposite effect.

After humans have deserted the earth, or forsaken their own cursed humanity, a super-evolved society of ants takes over the role of development and industry, persisting to the very end with a city of their own, an ambition which proves itself to be another inevitable journey to decay and extinction.

In between, there's compassion, loyalty, love, and even vegetarianism. A clear inspiration is the relationship between dogs and people. What would happen if that partnership evolved as canine intelligence arose to stand alongside its human partners? (Simak seems to prefer dogs to people, I feel certain that would be part of his biography in real life).

When the great works of all the species to have conquered the earth have come toppling down, there is memory, in the form of the ancient robot Jenkins, who has lived through it all and seen everything.

After reading SImak's "Way Station", I'm aware of the way nuclear holocaust shadowed his thinking. He avoids making war and conflict the driving force of his stories. The malign impetus of a doomed humanity is there in other ways, but he also finds hope and beauty at the core of existence.

I only take a star off because the book fails dismally in female representation. I am inclined to re-read the work of Cordwainer Smith, who also explored the way some of our best traits are expressed in the way we interact with our animal cousins.