The writing style is merely serviceable, and the characters are often thin, their motivations uncomplicated. Unfortunately, City, though broad in scope, lacks depth. 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. Although now it may look naïve, simplistic, perhaps even shallow, but at the time it seemed so imaginatively brave, so wide in scope, that it made you dizzy to contemplate it. 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. Remember when you-the naïve philosopher-struck by the similarities of molecule and solar system, imagined your body to be composed of billions of nano-planets and stars? I do.
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