Dogs and Robots and Mutants, Oh My!

My room was getting its semiannual cleaning this weekend (blech!) and I happened on a long-lost book that had been buried under my winter clothes: Clifford D. Simak's City.

It's a collection of short stories detailing Simak's future history of the decline of the human race. They're framed as myths that the intelligent dogs of the future tell each other about long-departed humanity- though educated dogs doubt that any such creature ever existed.

Humanity in Simak's future doesn't go out with a bang. It fails quietly, through social isolation and a lack of anything to strive for. It is replaced by dogs, who are made intelligent by means of surgery (today we'd say genetic engineering, but it amounts to the same thing) robots, and mutants- superintelligent, amoral beings whose purposes are never entirely clear.

Simak's writing is wistful: peaceful, sad, and ultimately resigned to the extinction of things. He seems to be an evolutionary writer, in the sense that H.G. Wells was; but where Wells triumphantly wrote of the dawn of new races, Simak writes eulogies for the fall of the old ones.

One surprise, in passing, is how much Isaac Asimov borrowed from Simak. His Solaria, with its agoraphobic isolationists, is directly taken from Simak; and Daneel Olivaw is clearly based on Jenkins, the immortal telepathic robot who discreetly guides humanity (and caninity) through history.