Just Finished Reading City by Clifford Simak

City is a 1952 science fiction novel by Clifford Simak, one of the greatest writers in this genre from the twentieth century.  Actually, it is more or less a coherent stringing together of several short stories that Simak had published from 1944 to 1951...two of them, Huddling Place and Desertion, rank among my all-time favorites.  I was overjoyed to see it on my local public library's bookshelves and readily checked it out...what an intriguing story!

In City, Simak envisions a future for humanity that I doubt anyone else could have concocted in their wildest dreams...as well as what lies in store for animal life on Earth, particularly dogs.  This having been noted, I must stress that the author inserted a very, very unlikely scenario in our near future when humanity has developed the technology to (1) develop a body based on a completely different biology and chemistry than our own, intricately adapted to life on a crushing, extremely poisonous planet like Jupiter, and (2) to be able to transfer a person's consciousness, or soul, into that synthetic body.  Not very likely, I'd posit...any more than we would train dogs to speak and think on the same level as people...another feature of this book.  However, alongside these far-flung speculations was a soberly realistic one: the development of artificial intelligence...as personalized by the robot Jenkins... to such a degree that it would assume the role of determining the future of life on Earth, as well as that on other worlds.  Now that prediction, made way back in the late 1940s, I'm afraid, is a very likely possibility as even today we find ourselves being swept away and confounded by the Internet and "smart" machines as we push buttons and delegate to them more and more of the things we used to do ourselves...

One reason I like to read old science fiction is that it often places our own time as the future that it describes...invariably there is a wide discrepancy between the author's vision and our own present reality.  Often there has been nuclear war and apocalypse, and often space travel has progressed much faster and to much farther places than it actually has.  I guess that having neither of these in our recent past is better than having both, but why couldn't we just have passed up on the war stuff and gone straight into settling other worlds?  But what if, in the process of exploring other worlds to populate, we discover paradise and virtual immortality?  Would Earth's population empty out as people by the billions are enticed to that other world and life?  Maybe that notion, put forth by Clifford Simak in this thought-provoking book that is both funny and a little scary, isn't quite as far-fetched as it may sound...