One of the joys of running your own website is having fun with what brings a level of personal fulfillment and entertainment.  Regardless of its age, City by Clifford D. Simak certainly does that.

As Science Fiction, some of its foundational science is badly outdated and was probably known to be faulty at the time of writing (at least to others than Mr. Simak).  Neither inventive surgeries nor the aid of attendant robots is really sufficient to explain the rise of Dogs as the dominant species on Earth, nor is the meddling of a single mutant man credible in setting the common ant along a path to city building and global domination.

Everything else about City made me look forward to reading, night after night.  Each section is prefaced by a learned Doggish author, waxing on about the scholarly debate that would make Man no more than a figment of early Doggish imagination.  Dogs, after abolishing killing among all animals and having taken leadership of the Brotherhood of Beasts, are opening paths into alternate worlds (that their remote ancestors were aware of but which no amount of barking on a dark and stormy night could convince their masters of).

The Dogs of Mr. Simak's City could never believe Man gave them the gift of speech, set them on the road to greater intelligence, or provided self-replicating robots to act as their servants.  If they had no explanation as to how a dog might build a robot in the first place, it proved sufficient to say "when it was necessary, a dog knew how.  When it is necessary, a dog always know how."

Such self-centered smugness is characteristic of so much in human culture, and it is that ability to reflect human foibles while at the same time revealing the possibility of truly alien thought patterns that makes this novel worth reading.  And it's not just the Dogs we come to understand, but the fate of humanity as it finds both transformation and paradise on Jupiter, the accomplishments of the human Mutants whose exponentially expanding intelligence separates them forever from human society, the robots who go wild, the mechanical servant Jenkins who remembers Man and husbands the culture of the Dogs though ten thousand years of history, and the ants, so completely and implacably alien that all other life on earth may have to leave for an alternate world.

"These are the stories that the Dogs tell when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north."

City helps us remember, or perhaps realize for the first time, that all of human history --at least the little we know-- is nothing, no more than a breath, no more than a beginning.  And the end of the world we know may be more like the end of childhood and the first awakening of real ambitions.