欧宝娱乐

Remember when you鈥攖he na茂ve philosopher鈥攕truck by the similarities of molecule and solar system, imagined your body to be composed of billions of nano-planets and stars? I do. I was twelve years old at the time, working at my parent's grocery, and I was suddenly forced to lean upon my push-broom to keep from falling headlong in a dizzy marvel of surprise.

Reading City (1952) is like that. Although now it may look na茂ve, simplistic, perhaps even shallow, at the time it must have seemed so imaginatively brave, so wide in scope, that it made you dizzy to contemplate it.

Simak's book is certainly ambitious. Originally a series of eight short stories published from '44 tp '51, it stretches more than ten thousand years in the future, from the days when men abandoned the large industrial cities in fear of the atomic bomb, through the growing isolation and disappearance the human species, unable to come to grips with its own violence or feel comfortable in its own skin, to the new order established on earth by the talking dogs and their robot helpers, who now face the threat of a rising insect civilization.

Unfortunately, City, though broad in scope, lacks depth. The writing style is merely serviceable, and the characters are often thin, their motivations uncomplicated. Worse, the world itself lacks credibility, evolving according to a child-like version of lamarckian inheritance: for example, some genius sets a glass dome over an anthill so the little dudes won't have to hibernate, and soon they are building little factories and pushing things around in tiny carts).

Such deficiences, however, are almost counterbalanced by the ingenious, self-referential framework of the novel. Simak connects his eight stories with a series of introductory scholarly notes that summarize the opinions of Doggish critics through the centuries (with names like Rover, Tighe, and Towser), who analyze the significance of these fabulous ancient folktales and conjecture that humankind itself may be nothing but a canine myth.

Which is 鈥渨ild,鈥� man, it could 鈥渂low your top,鈥� make you 鈥渇lip your lid鈥濃€攁s my twelve year old self might say. And if the twelve-year-old philosopher lives in you鈥攁s he still lives in me鈥攜ou may find something to enjoy in Simak's City.