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City Question 4: The Dogs
Did you enjoy the concept of the Dogs who were created to be a sort of caretaker as humankind continued to vacate earth? Do you think dogs were a good choice for this role or would another animal have worked better? Did the narration from the Dogs from the future work for you?
Comments
I liked the dogs! They were kept just enough different from people that they gave a different perspective, while at the same time being broadly speaking familiar. I think you'd need a domesticated animal with a humanlike social order to fit the way Simak develops the plot, so I don't think a herd animal like cows, sheep or horses would have served the purpose. It would have been fun to have one of the intelligent birds fit the role (corvids or parrots maybe) but probably when Simak was writing there wasn't a lot of study of them to suggest they'd make a good stand-in.
The best part about this book was the interstitial commentary, yielding some fun pseudo-academic wrangling. But really? Robots would have sufficed.
I liked the dogs, too. Less servile than the robots, but strangely more loyal. I was reminded of a book I read last year called The Lives of the Monster Dogs, about a group of dogs uplifted by a mad scientist who, after his death, use their inheritance money to move to New York City, where they try to cope as both media darlings and outsiders.
Ok, the dogs were cute and fun and loyal and all that, but I thought the idea that they would create some sort of pacifist society to be funny. One of the aspects of post-apocalyptic books that seems to be consistent is when society fails and the animals start going feral. I get that they are intelligent creatures and all in this book but they still would have certain evolutionary features which would make them at least as nasty as humans in my opinion. I would have thought the idea of killing other things to prevent their own elimination from earth would have occurred to them on their own, without Jenkins needing to give them the idea.
For emphasis!
Good idea, but they were too much like a blank slate that the Websters wrote on. The whole "Insects are different but dogs are similar, mammals of the world unite!," thing was poorly thought out. Like @clash_bowley says, the idea surely is that living things have different drives / motivations than thinking machines we might produce, but the dogs were so domesticated it seemed unreal. Lots to think about regarding the significance of domestication.
I increasingly think that the domestication of the dog was one of the crucial facets of human development - the implied need to recognise a similar-but-different social setup without annihilating it (contra what happened with other ancient hominid groups). It's been said that dogs domesticated humans just as much as the other way around. Quite what a sentient wolf would make of some of the toy breeds of dog is, of course, another matter...