City

The City: Season One Part One (Amazon.com Exclusive)
$24.95
as like the hills, it is fast moving and keeps your attention, well worth having in the collection...!

City
$27.00
CITY is perhaps the best known and most widely read work by Clifford Simak. It is a collection of 8 original stories that are interrelated, though a 9th story was added later as part of an anthology to honor John W. Campbell following his death. Because he had published nearly all of the stories in Campbell publications, Simak decided make his contribution to the collection a sequel to the earlier stories. Like many of Simak's works, the stories are set in rural Wisconsin. And there are dogs.

There are many things that I really loved in this book and several things that I just found appalling. As I mentioned, the stories were almost all published under the aegis of John W. Campbell, who had very definite ideas about themes that were to be pursued. One theme that he strongly encouraged his writers to pursue -- "demanded" might be a more accurate word -- was that of evolution. Campbell was obsessed with what humans and other lifeforms might achieve in future evolution. He loved heroes who became something more than human, through physical mutations or the acquisition of new abilities. Several elements in the CITY stories -- humans taking on new forms through complete physical transformations on Jupiter, dogs who can suddenly talk and are exceptionally intelligent, ant that suddenly take on advanced intelligence, benevolent robots -- are preoccupations of Campbell, things that recur throughout the stable of writers under his command. Unfortunately, some of the other marks of Campbell's editorship are also present: weak character development (because realistic characters would detract from the ideas), lackluster writing (for the same reason just noted), and rather huge leaps of logic that you must make in abeyance to big ideas. The prime example of the latter is the philosophical breakthrough that the Martian Juwain is said to be on the verge of making, a discovery that if made will generate massive advancement of humanity in only a couple of generations. Well, the silliness of such a conceit is obvious, especially if you have actually studied philosophy. The problems with such a notion are so obvious it is painful even to bring it up. For instance, how in the heck could anyone possibly know that someone was on the verge of a breakthrough of such magnitude? And when has philosophy ever had such an impact? Descartes caused a revolution in thinking in the 17th century, but nothing of the magnitude ascribed to Jumain, and Rousseau's political thought hit Europe like a bomb in the 18th. But dramatically move humanity forward in only a couple of years? Of course, Simak qualifies Juwain by stating that Martian philosophy was effective and as precise as any science. Though a moment's reflection will reveal that to be sheer verbiage, only bald assertion. This unsupportable conception in reality is just a literary device -- and a very bad one at that -- to move the story forward, a hinge upon which some of the plot turns. These kinds of ideas come up all the time in Campbell-era stories and frankly, looking at it from the early 21st century, I'm not clear as to why readers of the day put up with it. Perhaps they didn't (I've not taken the trouble that some have of going back and reading Campbell's publications and looked at the letters to the editor -- perhaps dozens of readers were as bothered by the silliness of "the Juwain philosophy" as I am). Another silly idea in the story -- and this sort of thing crops up again and again in the Campbell era -- is people undergoing radical physical transformations that allow them a blissful form of experience unavailable to those not undergoing the experience. There are countless analogs to this in pulp-era SF. A famous one is everyone in Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND finding the protagonist a profound thinker instead of the banal bore that he actually is, the notion being that you can only grasp his profundity if you can speak Martian. So in CITY you can only experience the bliss of living on Jupiter if you undergo a radical physical transformation.

OK, so that is the bad. The good is that Simak presents a delightfully fun and innovative view of the future. It isn't a terribly compelling vision, but once you get past that it is fun not as science but as fantasy. I mean, who doesn't like talking dogs? And ageless robots? And mysterious and powerful mutant humans? And intelligent ants? Well, actually, I guess the intelligent ants isn't all that great, but the rest are. In short, the stories are a heck of a lot of fun and delightful to read, as long as you can cut it slack on its short comings. My rating is based not on a comparison with contemporary SF stories, which are of a much higher literary quality, but on comparison with stories from the same era. The dogs are a lot of fun and the robot Jenkins one of finest robots from the period. While this may not rank among the best SF collections of all time, it is definitely one of the finest of the pulp era. Although its interest is more historical than literary, it is nonetheless among the more interesting from its time. Anyone wanting to better understand the history of SF should read it.

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City: A Story of Roman Planning and Construction
$10.99
Very interesting and well written. Amazing what they thought of then and how it still applies today!

City: Rediscovering the Center
$24.95
I bought this with high expectations, after reading his other books way back in graduate school, and enjoying them along with their concepts. The problem with City isn't that it's devoid of content, or great ideas, but that it has absolutely no sense of narrative or focus throughout the book.

Whyte jumps from topic to topic, all of which make sense in the broader concept, but it's almost like each of the sections could be taken as its own magazine article, or Wikipedia stub for that entry. He did some amazing work cataloging how people actually use cities, what they do, and some of the most common pitfalls. This book should be converted into an easy to skim website, then it'd be six stars. As a book, however, I browsed it, got some good ideas, probably missed some others, but never could get into it.