City by Clifford D. Simak

[james_davis_nicoll]

City by Clifford D. Simak

Comments

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

This review caused me to buy, not City, but Way Station and two Avram Davidson books. So, thanks!

[iayork.livejournal.com]

James may be the biggest driver of SF book sales in Canada, if not the world.

(I bought City.)

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

The naming convention for Dogs seems equally quaint and outdated. We don't have Spots, Tiges or Bowsers; we have Jasmines, Frasiers and Lillys.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

My brother named his dog Trotsky: make of that what you will. :)

James, did humans survive on some of the Cobbly worlds they were seeded on, or do we just not know?

(Speaking of Cobbly worlds, I vaguely recall a story involving an investigator looking in on some scientists on Pluto or some such which have made contact with alternate worlds, with unpleasant results. There's some sort of mind-controlling moth singer and a painting which is actually a doorway to one of those worlds. There is a line about one of the scientists being "owned" by something monstrous. Does anyone recall if that is a Simak story, or am I thinking of a work by someone else?)

[monte davis (from livejournal.com)]

Damn, that rings a bell, but all I can come up with is Vance's Moon Moth, which isn't it

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

My impression was that they all died out. The only extant population is in Geneva, which is sealed from the outside world.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Probably didn't do as good a job of wiping out the competition for Dogs as Jenkins hoped, then. Perhaps they ran into mutants.

[monte davis (from livejournal.com)]

55 years later, this (http://gnomepress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/City-jacket-front.jpg) is still a vivid enough visual memory that I know I must have taken out the library hardcover in Hingham, MA by age ten...

Because when we moved to NYC and I became a trawler of used book stores at eleven and twelve, I have an even more vivid memory of getting this (http://www.philsp.com/articles/images/Simak_City_Perma.jpg) (which I still have) for a dime or a quarter with a glow of "I love it, now I can own it!"

The poignance of the dogs' fragmentary, palimpsest memories of humans -- along with SF mag articles by Asimov, Willy Ley and Sprague de Camp -- had a lot to do with my lifelong interest in the borderlands of history and mythology. I can see the joints and seams of a fix-up now, but City had all the coherent poetics of deep time and fluid memory that I could handle back then.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

http://gnomepress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/City-jacket-front.jpg

The dog sadly contemplates the passing of tight buttocks from the world?

[monte davis (from livejournal.com)]

I was too young to ponder the Arno Breker - Rockwell Kent - Kelly Freas gluteal nexus

[w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)]

"I can assure you that there are a great many ants living in places where there is no winter."

One significant reason I like living somewhere there is winter. "Winter is coming" is reassuring to me--it keeps the bugs from getting out of hand.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

You obviously aren't in an area that's been infested by stinkbugs yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_marmorated_stink_bug

Once winter hits, they start worming their way inside buildings to take advantage of the heat, and they can squeeze in through the tiniest cracks. During the winter I usually catch two or three per day in my apartment, and when I open the windows for the first time in spring, there are usually piles of dead ones that got trapped between the glass and screen.

[w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)]

Fortunately I live in North Dakota - one of eight states where they haven't been detected so far. Looks like they can live on sweet corn and soybeans, though, so they might manage it eventually 8-(

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

We suddenly got a bunch of them in the house this year. Well, in the bedroom, mostly. We'd be less bothered by these bugs if they weren't so generally inept at being bugs. They keep flying headfirst into walls, making an awful racket.