City

Author: Clifford D. Simak

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, it wasn't uncommon to believe that humans were just incapable of getting along peacefully with themselves or others. It's a theme ideally suited to Simak's particular style and interests and he adopted it into a sequence of linked stories that were eventually gathered together as his classic novel City. In fact, City isn't about cities at all, but rather about the abandonment of cities. In the early stories, people move away from the city, initially running away from the threat of nuclear holocaust, but gradually they come to like the isolation. In successive tales, as urban civilisation breaks down, mutants begin to emerge and dogs are given the power of speech. When a human and his faithful dog take on the temporary form of the beings on Jupiter, they discover that they prefer to be like this, and when the rest of humanity finds out about it most elect to take on the new form. Eventually, dogs are left to build their own civilisation, and tell their tales about the mythical humans. Why it's on the list: City won the International Fantasy Award, and remains one of the best-loved novels from the 1940s. Simak's elegiac tone and the rather sentimental portrayal of the dogs mean that this book remains popular up to the present.