Black Gate

These are the stories that the Dogs tell when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north. Then each family circle gathers at the hearthstone and the pups sit silently and listen and when the story’s done they ask many questions:

“What is Man?” they’ll ask.

Or perhaps: “What is a city?”

Or: “What is a war?”

from the Editor’s Preface to City

City (1952), by Clifford D. Simak, unfolds over thousands of years, telling of the end of humanity, the rise of dogs and robots to terrestrial preeminence, and finally, the near abandonment of Earth. It’s a fix-up of nine stories, eight written between 1944 and 1951, and one more, added to later editions, in 1973. It is a book conceived of in anger and despair, yet one that strives to posit a better, more humane world — even if it’s one devoid of humans.

Perhaps because we, by which I mean the post-WW II generations, have grown up aware of the deepest, most evil tendencies of humanity, it’s difficult to appreciate completely the anger and despair over what happened during the 1930s and 40s. Years after its publication, Simak said:

“The series was written in a revulsion against mass killing and as a protest against war.”

That revulsion was so intense that Simak contemplated the extinction of his own species and its replacement by a better one.

I suppose following the First World War, there was some hope that humanity would avoid that sort of mass slaughter again. Instead, it only increased by many magnitudes. In an essay on City, Robert Silverberg wrote that the story “Desertion” was written in 1943 in direct response to reports from Europe about the Holocaust. Simak was a gentle writer, so there is little anger or bitterness in the novel, but he wasn’t prone to sentimentality either. His depiction of humanity’s downfall and supplantation is remorseless.

When Simak collected the stories, he presented them as a tales told by dogs to each other as perhaps no more than legends. For each story, Simak wrote an interstitial explaining what different dog philosophers thought about the veracity of each story, as well as any meaning it might hold for their society.

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Spacial Delivery (1961), a slight and slender book, is a relic of a past age when not every new book by an author had to be some sort of masterpiece. The same year this book came out, Dickson published two other novels and ten short stories. Over the course of fifty years of published writing, he wrote 55 novels and nearly 200 short stories. I can’t say for sure, but that sort of volume seems to have given him the freedom to write whatever sort of stories he wanted, whether high-concept space opera like his Childe Cycle, pulp fare like Hour of the Horde, comic stories like his Hoka collaborations with Poul Anderson, or middle-of-the-road standalones like this book.

When my friend Carl tossed me this back in the early eighties, he told me it was a comedy. I trusted him and gave it a read. It was funny, not in the laugh-out-loud style of the Hoka stories (which if you haven’t read, are about teddy bear-like aliens who have trouble distinguishing fact from fiction, and act out human stories, including Sherlock Holmes and The Jungle Book), but good for a chuckle or two. On rereading, the humor’s a little thin, but it’s a decent enough way to spend a couple of hours.

Out in a crucial sector of space between regions of human and Hemnoid hegemony, lies Dilbia, a planet of high mountains and deep forests. The Dilbians have a rugged, frontier-style civilization, with people living in small towns or with their clans in forests. The Dilbians themselves, well, the cover gives it away. They sort of look like bears — very big bears.

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I have no idea which Poul Anderson book I picked up first. It might have been The Winter of the World or Hrolf Kraki’s Saga. Whichever it was, I enjoyed it. It was enough to get me grabbing books at random from the big stack of his work my dad had bought. I’ve read a ton of his books, but with nearly seventy novels and sixty short story collections to his name, I still have plenty to go.

I’d venture a guess that Poul Anderson, multiple Hugo- and Nebula-winner, is probably better remembered for his fantasy than for his science fiction. Since his death in 2001, it seems his fantasy writing, the seminal swords & sorcery novel The Broken Sword in particular, has acquired a much greater reputation than his sci-fi.

While he wrote many standalone sci-fi novels, a large number were part of a specific future history. The Technic Civilization covers humanity’s spread across the stars, beginning, chronologically, with the story “The Saturn Game” set in the year 2055 and ending with “Starfog” in 7100. The majority of the stories take place during the second half of the third millennium and feature Falstaffian merchant prince Nicholas van Rijn, his agent David Falkayn, or Imperial secret agent Dominic Flandry.

Anderson’s future history stories are a mix of pulp space opera and hard sci-fi. At the heart of many of the stories is an explicit scientific conundrum that needs to be answered. Each puzzle, though, is couched in adventures with alien barbarians, enemy planets, or galactic empires.

Trader to the Stars (1964) collects three van Rijn adventures, “Hiding Place,” “Territory,” and “The Master Key.” Each features van Rijn working out evolutionary puzzles, usually in the face of some grave danger and always in hopes of making a profit. The first two throw the trader into the middle of danger, while the third lets him, Nero Wolfe-like, get to the bottom of a native uprising from the luxurious surroundings of his penthouse.

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