City

City is a fix-up novel envisioning a far-future Earth from which humans have largely vanished, leaving behind intelligent dogs, robots, and mutants who inherit the planet. The stories are presented as ancient canine legends about a possibly mythical being called 'Man,' passed down through generations of dogs.

City won the International Fantasy Award for best fiction in 1953, one of the earliest major awards in the science fiction genre. The award recognized the complete novel assembled from stories originally published in Astounding Science Fiction magazine during the 1940s.

City is a fix-up novel composed of eight linked short stories published in Astounding Science Fiction between 1944 and 1951. Simak connected the individual tales with framing material and interludes presenting them as legends told by dogs in a distant future.

The novel explores themes of urban abandonment, the dissolution of the human species through transcendence, the ethical obligations of intelligent beings toward one another, and the pastoral relationship between technology and nature. Simak, a newspaperman by profession, brought a contemplative and humanistic tone that was unusual for the era's science fiction.