Retro Review: "City" by Clifford D. Simak

I'm not a huge William Timmins fan, but this is a great cover.

"City" is a science fiction novelette by Clifford D. Simak, which was first published in the May 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and is a finalist for the 1945 Retro Hugo. The magazine version may be found online here. "City" is part of Simak's eponymous City cycle and has been widely reprinted.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point!

"City" opens with an old man known only as Gramp Stevens (in "The Huddling Place", a later City story, we learn that his full name is William Stevens) sitting in a lawn chair, enjoying the sun and watching as the lawn is mowed. Gramp Stevens grumbles about his grandson Charlie's taste in music and grumbles even more, when his daughter Betty asks him to move, so the lawn can be properly mowed.

The whole scene feels like a 1950s suburban idyll and reads like something found in an issue of the Saturday Evening Post or Ladies Home Journal, if not for the fact that the lawnmower is a robot. The automatic lawnmower might be the most accurate prediction found in all of Astounding in 1944, by the way, because robotic lawnmowers have become pretty common in recent years. The timing is a bit off, though, because from dates given in this and other stories, we can deduce that "City" is set in 1990.

We gradually get more clues that this is not a piece of contemporary fiction, when Gramp Stevens gets a visitor, Ole Johnson. What makes Johnson's arrival remarkable is that Ole Johnson still drives a car, an ancient, dilapidated car that would never pass the mandatory biannual technical TÜV inspections in Germany. Johnson is the only person Gramp Stevens knows who still drives a car – everybody else switched to personal helicopters long ago. And since no one is using cars anymore, the streets have long since fallen into disrepair as well, the asphalt cracked and overgrown with weed. Gasoline is no longer available as well – Johnson's car runs on a mix of kerosene, tractor oil and rubbing alcohol.

Gramp Stevens and Ole Johnson chat for a bit, then Johnson takes off again to try and sell some of his homegrown vegetables at the market. Gramp cautions Johnson that he won't be able to sell anything. Everybody is only eating hydroponic vegetables now, because hydroponics are more sanitary and the produce supposedly tastes better. I suspect Simak never had the misfortune of trying to eat the watery and tasteless Dutch greenhouse tomatoes that were common until approx. twenty years ago.

Once Ole Johnson has gone and the robot lawnmower has chased Gramp Stevens away by switching to watering the lawn, Gramp gets another visitor, Mark Bailey, one of the few remaining neighbours. However, Bailey only drops by to say good-bye, because his daughter-in-law has finally persuaded his son to move out into the country like everybody else. Gramp confesses that his daughter Betty is pestering her husband to move into the country as well, but that her husband won't go along with it, because he is the secretary of the chamber of commerce of the unnamed city, so moving away would look bad. Gramp Stevens and Mark Bailey muse about the olden days of the American suburban idyll.

Once Bailey has left, Gramp Stevens goes for a walk and muses some more about the lost suburban idyll and coincidentally also gives us an infodump about why this particular suburban idyll is largely deserted and has fallen into disrepair. Since this is a Clifford D. Simak story, the infodump is also much better written than the usual Astounding infodumps.

In short, the introduction of personal planes and helicopters made cars unnecessary and commuting easier. The introduction of hydroponics meant that traditional farms were no longer necessary. This freed up former farmland, so people flocked out into the country to purchase huge estates. Furthermore, new constructions technologies mean that homes can be quickly and cheaply built and altered at will. Gramp Stevens doesn't like any of these new developments. He also has another encounter, this time with Henry Adams, the grandson of a former neighbour and old war buddy of Gramp's. Henry Adams wants to know where his grandfather lived. Gramp shows him the house and also learns that his old war buddy has died.

The scene now switches to John J. Webster, son-in-law of Gramp Stevens and one of Websters who are the red thread that runs through the City stories. Webster is late for a city council meeting, when he meets a ragged man – Simak describes him as a scarecrow – carrying a shotgun. We learn that this ragged man is named Levi Lewis and that he is one of the farmers displaced by the rise of hydroponics and the exodus to the country. As a result, Lewis and his fellow displaced farmers moved into the abandoned city houses to grow their gardens and hunt rabbits. However, these squatters are not wanted in the city either. Police Chief Jim Maxwell considers them criminals and wants to get rid of the abandoned houses as quickly as possible by burning them down. After all, the city owns the houses now because they were seized over unpaid taxes. Other members of the city council disagree and so Webster walks into a heated debate.

One city council member accuses the chamber of commerce of being ineffective and running campaigns and events that cost money, but fail to draw the necessary crowds because the crowds have all moved to the country. When Webster, who is the secretary of the chamber of commerce, is asked to give his opinion, he holds an impassioned monologue and declares that the city is dead and over, that it was dead and over even before personal helicopters and hydroponics were its death knell, that people headed out to the suburbs as soon as they could. Since Webster has just proven himself to be insubordinate and well as something of a jerk, he's fired on the spot. Webster doesn't much mind – after all, now he can move to the country, too, and buy himself a huge estate with a running stream. Though he'll have to find a new job first.

However, finding a new job is easier said than done and so we meet Webster again, when he heads for an office with the slightly sinister name "Bureau of Human Adjustment", which is apparently an employment agency. The secretary – just referred to as a girl – tells him that he is expected, which surprises Webster, because he didn't make an appointment and doesn't need to be adjusted either. All he needs is a job. To his surprise, Taylor – head of the bureau – offers him one. He also tells Webster that they have been expecting him, because Webster's old boss made sure that he was blackballed and won't get a job on any city council or chamber of commerce anywhere in the world.

Now it's Taylor's turn to infodump. He tells Webster that the Bureau of Human Adjustment is not really an employment agency. Instead, they help people to adjust to the brave new world they find themselves in. The advent of atomic power cost a lot of jobs, so people had to be retrained and learn new skills. The abolition of traditional farming cost even more jobs and caused even more problems, because – so Taylor says – the farmers didn't really have any skills beyond growing crops and handling animals. I'd say that Taylor (and Simak for that matter) have never met a farmer, but it seems that it's surprisingly common sentiment that farming is low-skilled work. Michael Bloomberg uttered it just recently during his failed presidential campaign. With that attitude, I'm not at all surprised that his campaign failed.

Furthermore, those dastardly farmers are resisting Taylor's attempts to adjust them and flat out refuse to learn new skills. Webster agrees and tells Taylor about the squatters living in the abandoned houses and subsisting on what they can grow and hunt. Taylor in turn asks Webster whether he knows Ole Johnson and whether he will help to adjust him. Webster is doubtful that Johnson will let himself be adjusted – after all, there was a brief scene earlier, where Martha Johnson tried and failed to persuade her husband to sell the farm and get a job at the hydroponic farm as well as a personal helicopter and a nice country home with running water and a real bathtub – but he agrees to try.

When Webster leaves the Bureau of Human Adjustment, he once again meets the ex-farmer turned squatter Levi Lewis who tells him that the police are getting ready to burn down the abandoned houses and smoke out the squatters. But the squatters have had enough. They're not leaving and they're armed. Oh yes, and Gramp Stevens has joined them and appointed himself as their general, employing his old wartime skills (so much for unskilled farmers). Plus, Gramp has commandeered an ornamental cannon and also found some shells to go with it. Webster is understandably horrified – after all, this will mean a bloodbath. He tells Levi to let Gramp know that he shan't shoot unless he absolutely has to. Then Webster heads for the city hall to prevent a bloodbath.

Webster storms into mayor's office, knocking down his (male) secretary first, and gives yet another monologue about how the mayor is clinging to outdated ideas such as rugged individualism and "pulling oneself up by one's boostraps". At this point, I was wondering how on Earth Simak ever managed to sell the City stories to Astounding, since Astounding is normally all about rugged individualism and "by one's bootstraps" ideals. But then, pretty much every Astounding story I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project has been atypical in some way.

Webster ends his monologue by telling the mayor that if the police burns down the abandoned houses, the squatters will shell the city centre, starting with the town hall. And if the city centre is shot to rubble, the mayor will certainly lose his job, because the few remaining city residents won't re-elect him. That threat is about to work, too, especially since gun fire is heard, followed by a loud explosion. Unfortunately, the chief of police calls the mayor at this point to inform him that the squatters had a really big gun – apparently, the chief of police has never seen a cannon before – but that it exploded.

Webster is understandably worried about Gramp Stevens, who was after all the one person who knew how to operate a cannon, and wants to check on him as soon as possible. The mayor is still intending to burn down the houses, when Gramp Stevens himself comes hobbling into the mayor's office, Henry Adams in tow. It turns out that Henry Adams used the fortune his family made by getting early into atomic power to pay all the unpaid taxes and buy up all of the abandoned houses. And would the mayor kindly stop burning his property, please.

The mayor orders a very disgruntled chief of police to put out the fires and call in the fire department, if necessary, though I suspect the fire engines will have a hard time even getting to the houses, considering the roads are all overgrown. Henry Adams finally delivery the coupe de grace. He informs the mayor that he will ask the courts for a dissolution of the city charter, since he is now the owner of most of the city grounds. And the courts will comply, because cities are no longer necessary. Oh yes, and the mayor is fired.

The story ends with Webster, Gramp and Henry Adams standing on a hill, overlooking what was once the city or rather its suburbs. Henry Adams announces that he is going to restore the abandoned houses and turn them into a museum, so people can see how their ancestors lived. The squatters can stay – after all, someone needs to restore the houses and gardens. Henry Adams also offers Webster a job as project manager/museum director. Webster is initially reluctant to accept – after all, his wife really wants to move into the country. However – so Henry Adams tells him – Webster doesn't actually have to stay in the city. He can simply commute every day. And just in case you were wondering what happened to Ole Johnson – inspired by Henry Adams and the city museum, Johnson has decided to turn his farm into a holiday attraction. And so the story ends happily, but those of us who have read the entire City cycle know that this is but the first step that will eventually lead to human extinction, as dogs and ants take over the world.

The cover for the first collected edition of the "City" stories.

When I first read the City stories as a teenager, I mentally filed them in the same "terrible dystopia" category as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World. I also didn't much care for them, less than I liked Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World actually, because those two books at least had the advantage of being some of the few works of assigned school reading I actually enjoyed. City, however, was not assigned reading (and indeed the teacher who assigned Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four had never heard of it, when I asked her if she knew this other dystopian novel I'd read), but an overprized import paperback I'd bought for myself with my pocket money.

In fact, I was surprised how much I enjoyed "Desertion", when I reread it for the Retro Reviews project, because I remembered not liking the City stories very much. "City" and "The Huddling Place" are both closer to the City stories as I remember them. And while I like the City stories these days and can also tell that they are among the best stories published in Astounding in 1944, I can also easily see why 16-year-old Cora did not care for the City stories at all.

As I said in my review of "The Huddling Place", I consider myself a city person and my 16-year-old self was even more of a city person. 16-year-old Cora was determined to move to a major international metropolis – London, New York or Paris were my top choices – as soon as possible and literally could not understand that there were people who actually enjoyed living in the countryside or in suburbs or small towns. I always assumed that people were forced to live in such places due to jobs, money issues or the idiotic idea that children should grow up in the countryside.

Now my parents fell for that particular idiotic idea and moved to what was then a very rural area a few years before I was born. So I spent my teens in a village without a cinema or theatre or a bookshop or a shopping mall (or indeed any shops that weren't food related) or a discotheque (never my thing, but sorely missed by my classmates) or any kind of entertainment option at all. Bremen, which had all of those things and was a city of acceptable size, was only eleven kilometres away. But the only way to get there was by bus and the bus only went five times per day. The last bus went at 8 PM, so forget attending any evening events. Of course, you could always go by bike, but again my parents wouldn't let me out on my bike after dark.

To the teen girl who was grew up in that place, never really fit in there and hated it, the city world of Trantor, capital of the Galactic Empire from Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories, sounded like the coolest place ever and I would have moved there immediately, if it had been remotely possible (Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar was a distant second in my personal ranking of fictional places from SFF where I wanted to live). City, on the other hand, was a horror story about a world, where everybody was forced to live in the countryside, because some arseholes had decided that cities were superfluous. Even if the huge country estates themselves, run by robot labour, are pretty nice places to live, even if it's not clear where the wealth to run them comes from, as Steve J. Wright points out in his review. Viewed through this lens, it's obvious why my younger self didn't much care for the City cycle.

The true protagonists of "City": Robot butler Jenkins and the dogs.

Adult me has a more differentiated view of the City stories. No, the City stories are not horror tales, but neither are they happy stories – after all, humanity eventually dies out, as dogs and ants (and Jenkins, the faithful robot butler) take over the world. And Simak very obviously has an ambiguous view of future he presents – after all, the main POV character in "City" is Gramp Stevens who does not care for all of those newfangled ideas at all. John J. Webster may deliver all the monologues, but it's very clear that Simak's sympathy lies with Gramp Stevens and the displaced farmers.

Adventures Fantastic views "City" as a conflict between collectivists and individualists in his review of the story, but that's not what "City" is about, in spite of some vague mentions of a world government and John J. Webster's crack about rugged individualism and that it's as over as the city. If anything, the people who move out onto huge country estates are the individualists, while the squatters and the city council types try to keep some semblance of human society running. In the end, the City stories are neither utopias nor dystopias, they are is a serious attempt at extrapolation based trends that were already apparent by the time the first stories were written.

"City", reimagined as a Soviert war monument.

We mostly associate the move out of the city centres to the suburbs with the post-WWII era, when identikit suburbs like Levittown sprang up all over the US, made possible by the proliferation of cars. But the desire to leave the cities behind clearly predates the widespread suburbification of the postwar era. Nor was it purely a US phenomenon, though it was most pronounced there. But the urge to move "into the green countryside" was present in the UK and (West) Germany and elsewhere in Europe as well.

Furthermore, the urge to leave the city behind is also at least partly understandable, because in the first half of the twentieth century "city" often meant crime and disease-ridden slums, it meant poverty, it meant lack of space. And in most of Europe, the cities were ruins and rubble anyway. By the time I first read the City stories in the late 1980s, the ruins had been rebuilt (though there were holdouts – hidden behind advertising signs – well into the 1990s), the old slums were gone, poverty had been moved to the public housing estates on the periphery of the big cities and vaccination programs and improved medical treatments had dealt with the diseases. By then, cities were the places where the shops were, the cinemas, the theatres, the museums, the restaurants, the clubs, where the life and the lights were.

In the good old science fiction tradition of "If this goes on…", Simak tried to extrapolate a trend he saw developing into the future. And as with most science fiction attempts at making predictions, he gets things very wrong, even if he did correctly predict the robotic lawnmower as well as the ending of World War II (Gramp Stevens and Henry Adams' grandfather started building their respective suburban homes in 1946, after they came back from the war).

This psychedelic cover of "City" makes Jenkins look rather sinister.

For starters, Simak failed to anticipate that the trend towards surbubification and (white) flight from the cities would not continue indefinitely, but that there would be a reurbification as a counter reaction. In Europe, I'd say that the reurbification has been going on at least since the 1970s. In the US, it started somewhat later, in the 1990s to 2000s. But basically what happened is that once the kids who grew up in the suburbs and experienced all the downsides of being a teenager stuck in a place with little to nothing to do came of age, they moved back into the cities, which had been cleaned up by that point. Similarly, some of those who had moved to the suburbs or even the countryside as newlyweds and young families move back into the city in older age, when driving becomes difficult and living within walking distance to shops, doctors, etc… becomes important.

The world Simak describes is also very much a white American middle class world. People of colour don't seem to exist in Simak's stories at all – at any rate, I can't recall a single person of colour in his oeuvre. Simak normally also isn't all that great on the gender front either, though "City" at least features two named female characters – Betty Webster, nee Stevens, and Martha Johnson – with speaking parts as well as an unnamed female secretary with lines and another named female character – Mark Bailey's daughter-in-law Lucinda – without any lines. Alas, Betty and Martha never interact with each other and the only purpose of the various female characters in "City" seems to be to harass their menfolk to move out into the country already. Meanwhile, all of the important people who make the decisions – the city council, the squatters, the Bureau of Human Adjustment – are all white men.

Jenkins and the dogs in their own huddling place

"City" – and that's probably part of what irritated me as a young reader – is also a very American text. In Europe, downtowns were never abandoned and remained the commercial centres of the respective cities, even as many people moved out into the suburbs. Also, simply letting roads and infrastructure decay and abandoning houses as they are, not even bothering to sell them, is another very American phenomenon. In Germany, roads and other infrastructure that is no longer needed is usually removed, but not left to decay. Germany is also slim picking for urban archaeologists, because houses, shops, malls and being abandoned and left as they are is extremely rare over here. It did happen in former East Germany, largely because no one knew who the legal owner of many buildings was, but is almost unknown in the western part of Germany. The one example I can think of is a clothing shop in the small town of Berne that was abandoned as is and looks like a time warp into the 1970s, because its owner was murdered.

Deliberately destroying homes for fear of squatters is another very American thing. In Centralia, a town in Pennsylvania which has the misfortune of being largely uninhabitable due to being located on top of a mine fire that emits toxic gases, the empty houses were torn down to discourage squatters after the residents were evacuated/forced out, depending on whom you ask. I can't really imagining this happening in Europe, even if a place is completely uninhabitable.

Ants play an important role in "City", but I'm not sure if I would have used them as a cover model.

Hydroponics may have looked like the future of agriculture in 1944. The Complete Guide to Soilless Gardening by William Frederick Gericke, the seminal book on hydroponics, was published in 1940 and by the 1930s hydroponics were used on several pacific islands with little to no agricultural land to feed airline passengers during stopovers and later US soldiers stationed in the Pacific. So Simak can be forgiven for believing that hydroponics would eventually replace conventional agriculture.
However, while hydroponics are good for lettuce, tomatoes, peppers and other vegetables (and for houseplants), they don't work for grains, which are the crops that take up the most space. And greenhouses take up a lot of space as well, as everybody who has ever visited the Netherlands knows. Simak also completely fails to anticipate the movement towards more natural and organic food as well as the fact that at least in the early years, greenhouse vegetables simply didn't taste very good, though the quality has markedly improved in the past twenty years or so.

Talking of hydroponics, do you know those little clay pellets that are used for hydroponic houseplant growing and are often found in potted plants in banks, malls and other public buildings? Do you know what they are made of? They are made from slag from furnaces and kilns. Back when hydroculture for houseplants became popular in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, my Dad was the supervisor of a hazardous waste disposal facility in Moordijk in the Netherlands. The facility burned hazardous waste at very high temperatures in special furnaces either on land or at sea for the particularly toxic substances (the process was later banned, because seals started dying in North Sea – of a virus and not of burn residues – but try telling that to the environmentalists and politicians). And the slag left over in the furnace after the waste had been burned was used to make those little clay pellets. Mind you, the residue had been tested and was completely harmless – the toxic substances had been neutralised by the high temperatures inside the furnace. And besides it was only used to grow houseplants anyway, not vegetables for human consumption. But whenever my Dad tells the story of how they made a lot of money turning slag from toxic waste burning into hydroculture clay pellets, you can see people slowly moving away from the pots with the sad houseplants. Sometimes, I swear he does it on purpose.

Finally, meat production is something Simak does not consider at all. Unless the people of Simak's have gone vegan, they are going to need land to raise animals. Even factory farming under horribly cramped conditions (and the worst excesses of factory farming have been banned in Europe for a while now due to public pressure) requires space. And there is no way to grow a cow or pig or chicken via hydroponics.

This Dutch cover for "City" manages to be both accurate and misleading.

 Simak also assumes that farming will not innovate and that farmers will remain stuck in the 19^th century in houses without running water and electricity, as becomes clear in the scene between Ole Johnson and his wife Martha. And in 1944, there probably still were a lot of farms that had neither running water nor electricity. However, technical progress not only came to rural areas – no, the much maligned farmers were often innovators. The hydroponic greenhouses that dominate rural areas in the Netherland were set up by farmers, not outside innovators. And in Germany, farmers were at the forefront of the transition towards renewable energy. Whenever you go to a renewable energy presentation or workshop, most of the people you'll meet there are not stereotypical hippies, but otherwise conservative farmers. I even know one former farmer who now rents out his fields, barns and pig pens to other farmers, because he makes more money selling renewable energy systems.

So in short, "City" is an attempt at serious extrapolation of social trends that has been overtaken and rendered obsolete by reality. This is an issue the City cycle shares with most golden age science fiction. And the fact that the futures presented never came to pass does not matter, as long as the stories are good. So is "City" still a good story?

This French cover is my favourite of the many covers "City" has had over the years, because it perfectly encapsulates what the series is about.

Well, Clifford D. Simak was certainly one of the best writers publishing in Astounding in the 1940s. And like all Simak stories, "City" is well written. Nonetheless, it is a flawed story and IMO the weakest of the four City stories Simak published in 1944.

The main problem with "City" is that it spends much of its time meandering about in search of a plot, as Gramp Stevens reminisces about the good old days. And once it finally finds a plot, namely the conflict between the squatters and the city council, most of the actual action happens off-page. We don't even see Gramp Stevens siding with the squatters, nor do we see him liberating the cannon. The brief firefight between the squatters and the police is observed at a distance by John J. Webster and the mayor. The action happening off-page was a common issue with Astounding in the 1940s, for example Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories also tend to keep the actual action off stage in favour of having people talk later about what happened. And yes, I know that Astounding was the idea mag, but some action to go with the ideas would have been nice.

The two monologues by John J. Webster also sit like indigestible lumps in the middle of the story. They also seem a lot more clumsy than Simak's usual writing and I now wonder whether Campbell, who we know was fond of characters monologuing, insisted on them. Paul Fraser also complains about the speechifying and data-dumping in his review of "City". And yes, I know I just asked for more action, but John J Webster of the mild-mannered and agoraphobic Websters punching out the mayor's (male) secretary just feels out of character.

I would classify the early City stories under what Joanna Russ called "Galactic Suburbia" science fiction – domestic stories that project the values of mid-century American suburbia into the future. And while "Galactic Suburbia" science fiction is normally associated with the so-called silver age of science fiction – and with women writers, for that matter – I was surprised to find several "Galactic Suburbia" stories during the golden age, quite a few of them written by men.

"Galactic Suburbia" science fiction is often reminiscent of the sort of fiction found in women's magazines and the so-called slicks – magazines like the Saturday Evening Post – during the 1940s and 1950s. "City" is no exception here and particularly the beginning with Gramp Stevens reminiscing about the good old days feels very much like a literary story of the period with some science fiction trappings thrown in. And while adult me appreciates Simak's writing skills as well as the melancholy atmosphere of the abandoned streets and houses (yet another melancholic story in a 1944 issue of Astounding), I'm not surprised that my teen self did not much care for City.

"City" is a well-written, if flawed novelette, but it's not the best novelette of 1944. It's not even the best City novelette of 1944, since "Census" is better, as are "Desertion" and "The Huddling Place". I suspect a lot of Retro Hugo nominators went by name recognition here – ditto for "Foundation" winning over the superior "Bridle and Saddle" in the 1943 Retro Hugos. After all, "City" and "Foundation" were the stories that the respective fix-up novel/series was named after. And most of us will have encountered those stories first in fix-up form. Finally, it is also notable that with many fix-ups – definitely the Foundation trilogy and maybe City as well – the whole is greater than its parts. Though with City, the individual parts are usually pretty damn good as well, even if "City" is one of the weaker entries in the cycle.

Retro Review: "The Huddling Place" by Clifford D. Simak

Is it me or were some of the 1944 Astounding covers really ugly?

"The Huddling Place" is a science fiction short story by Clifford D. Simak, which was first published in the July 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The magazine version may be found online here. "The Huddling Place" is part of Simak's City cycle and has been widely reprinted.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point!

"The Huddling Place" starts off with the funeral of one Nelson F. Webster. It might be a scene in any contemporary set story, if not for the fact that the pallbearers are robots and that Nelson F. Webster died in 2117, aged eighty-three.

Our narrator is Jerome A. Webster, son of the late Nelson F. Webster, and one of only three Websters still left alive. The other two are Jerome's son Thomas, who will soon be leaving for Mars, and Jerome's mother, who never gets a name. In the course of the funeral, We also get a brief rundown of the Websters (and a Webster father-in-law, William "Gramp" Stevens who is an important character in the first "City" story published earlier the same year)  interred in the family crypt on the Webster estate. Again, only one woman is mentioned, Mary Webster, Jerome's late wife.

For four generations now, the Websters have lived on a spacious estate with whispering pine trees, meadows, a rocky ridge and a stream full of trouts, ever since John J. Webster, great-great-grandfather of Jerome, moved there after humans abandoned cities in the twentieth century in favour of what the characters consider gracious living on huge lots of land, served by a small army of robots.
The story follows Jerome through his day, as he retreats into his study to mourn his father, not even bothering to say good-bye to the priest who conducted the funeral service. Instead, Jerome leaves the Websters' faithful robot butler Jenkins to deal with the priest, just as he leaves him to deal with everything else.

We learn that Jerome never leaves his house, even though he spent several years as a doctor on Mars in his younger days. Nowadays, however, Jerome doesn't see any need to leave his house. After all, modern technology allows him to speak to anybody, virtually visit any place, attend a concert or play, browse a library and conduct any business he might want to conduct, all from the comfort of his home. This short paragraph is probably the most prescient thing published in Astounding in the entire year of 1944, because the Internet allows us to do all of that from the comfort of our own home as well. Though I hope that most of us react to those possibilities a little differently than Jerome.

Jerome's contemplations are interrupted by a virtual visit from an old friend, the Martian philosopher Juwain whom Jerome met during his time as a doctor on Mars. Juwain has come to pay his respects to the late Nelson F. Webster and also to ask why Jerome never physically returned to Mars for a visit, even though the Martians owe him a great debt, because Jerome wrote the book on Martian medicine. For we learn that the Martians never really had doctors before the humans arrived. Instead, they simply accepted illnesses as fatal. Meanwhile, Martians have come up with orderly and logical philosophy that may be applied as a practical tool, rather than the fumbling human attempts at philosophy. And Juwain is about to make a further breakthrough in philosophy, a breakthrough that will help both humans and Martians. A. Williams' interior art depicts Juwain as a being with flimsy tentacle-like limbs and a huge domed head, which certainly suggests a species of philosophers.

This is not the first time in Astounding in the 1940s that different races and species are given different specialisations they are inherently suited for. Something similar can be found in the Jay Score stories by Eric Frank Russell, one of which – "Symbiotica" – was a finalist for the 1944 Retro Hugo. Though it's certainly interesting that the superior Martian philosophy is orderly, logical and practically applicable, i.e. it is a type of philosophy that would have appealed to John W. Campbell. Meanwhile, humanity still gets to be superior, if only because medicine is a much more vital field than philosophy for the survival of any species.

The story picks up again at a spaceport, where Jerome sees his son Thomas off to Mars. Jerome can barely keep himself from begging Thomas to stay on Earth. Once the spaceship carrying Thomas to Mars has lifted off, Jerome suffers the mother of all panic attacks. He barely makes it across the open stretch of concrete back to the terminal building, where he huddles on a chair near the wall, terrified of the noise and the strangers all around him.

Jerome is desperate to return home at once, so he can feel safe again. However, the faithful robot butler Jenkins informs him that they can't leave just yet, because the Websters' private helicopter is in need of repair. Jerome freaks out even more. "I understand, sir," Jenkins says, "Your father had it, too."

Now Jenkins reveals that crippling agoraphobia apparently runs in the Webster family and usually sets in at around fifty. That's the true reason why Jerome as well as all the Websters before him never leave their estate. Because they cannot.

Being a doctor, Jerome conducts an experiment and invites some two-hundred and fifty men (Simak's word choice, not mine) to visit him. Only three of those invited actually show up, which suggests to Jerome that more and more of humanity (well, the male half) is succumbing to the same crippling agoraphobia that has affected him. This is, Jerome assumes, the result of humanity's lifestyle living far away from each other on huge tracts of land, where they feel so comfortable that they simply cannot bear to leave the familiar surroundings, unless they absolutely have to. And maybe not even then.

Jerome's theory is tested when he gets a call from a man called Clayborne, an old acquaintance from Mars. Clayborne works for the Martian Medical Commission and has contacted Jerome with an urgent request. After all, Jerome is the leading expert on the Martian brain and Clayborne has a patient who urgently needs a brain operation, an operation only Jerome can carry out. And that patient is none other than Jerome's good friend Juwain who has been asking for Jerome.

"You'll bring him here?" Jerome asks, only to be informed that Juwain cannot be moved. Jerome will have to go to Mars to operate him, otherwise Juwain will die.

"But I cannot come," Jerome tells the increasingly (and understandably) irritated Clayborne. Surely he isn't really needed, surely someone else can carry out the operation. Clayborne, however, won't have none of that. He's sending a spaceship straight to the Webster estate.

Soon thereafter, Jerome receives another call, this time from one Henderson, president of the World Committee, which appears to be the global government in Simak's future. Henderson also insists that Jerome must go to Mars to save Juwain. Because if Juwain dies, the philosophical breakthrough he was about to achieve, a breakthrough which will advance humanity and Martians by a hundred thousand years, dies with him.

To be fair, Jerome is determined to at last try to go to Mars, even though he is utterly terrified. He also realises that even though humanity may have left the cities behind, they have still psychologically chained themselves to their homes. Finally, he realises that he has to break those chains and leave his comfortable home behind, just as humans left the cities behind some two hundred years before. So Jerome forces himself to pack a bag and promptly suffers yet another panic attack.

His panic attack is interrupted by Jenkins who arrives to tell him about a most extraordinary occurrence. A ship landed at the estate and wanted to take Jerome to Mars.

"They are here?" Jerome asks, "Why didn't you call me?"

Jenkins declares that he did not want to bother Jerome, because the whole thing was just too preposterous. So Jenkins personally told the men to leave and when they refused, he threw out by force.

Poor Juwain is doomed and humanity will never learn the philosophical revelations he had in store for them. And all because of an overzealous robot butler.

I enjoyed "Desertion", the other Clifford D. Simak story I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project, a whole lot and it's definitely going on my Retro Hugo ballot. I did not like "The Huddling Place" nearly as much. What is more, the story reminded me of what always irritated me about Simak's stories, when I first read them as a teenager, namely the anti-urbanism.

Now I'm very much a city person and I was even more of a city person, when I was younger. My teenaged self wanted to live in some major international metropolis – London, New York or Paris were my top choices – and literally could not understand that there were people who actually enjoyed living in the countryside or in suburbs or small towns. I always assumed they were forced to live there due to jobs, money issues or families who had the idiotic idea that children should grow up in the countryside. Realising at age fifteen that American suburbs like the ones you always see in horror films were a real thing where real people lived utterly baffled me, because who would choose to live in a horror movie setting?

When I read about city world of Trantor, capital of the Galactic Empire from Isaac Asimov's stories, I thought Trantor was the coolest place ever and immediately would have moved there, if that had been at all possible. And when I first encountered the City cycle by Clifford D. Simak at around the same time, I thought it was a horrible dystopia where human had abandoned the cities to live on country estates where nothing ever happens and no one ever goes anywhere, because there is nowhere to go. Worse, I strongly suspected that Simak was not aware that he was writing about what to me was a horrible dystopia.

My adult self has a more differentiated view of the City stories. Yes, Clifford D. Simak was clearly not a city person and obviously preferred the countryside. Just as he was obviously a dog person. Indeed, I was stunned that there is no dog anywhere in sight in "The Huddling Place", because dogs are so prominent in Simak's fiction, including the City stories.

However, even as early as "The Huddling Place" it is very clear that Simak does not view the cityless world he has created as an unalloyed good (and civilisation does eventually break down in the City cycle and humans die out, while dogs and ants take over the world). After all, Jerome A. Webster is a pitiful person, chained to his home and unable to leave even to save the life of his friend. Furthermore, Jerome is utterly dependent on Jenkins and the other robots. It isn't Jerome himself who makes the fatal final decision, Jenkins makes it for him.

I vaguely remembered that the way the humans treated their robots as slaves to run their oversized estates was one of the things that annoyed me about the City cycle. However, upon rereading the story, I realised that it's not so much the humans who are enslaving the robots. Instead, it's the humans who are slaves to their robots. Furthermore, I also remembered Jenkins as wholly positive figure fully in the "robot as pathos" range, to quote Asimov's classification of science fictional robots. But upon rereading, I found Jenkins an almost sinister figure. Does he truly have the best interests of Jerome and the other Websters at heart or is he slyly making Jerome even more reliant on him? After all, if not for Jenkins, it's quite possible that Jerome might have managed to overcome his fears and gone to Mars after all.

Agoraphobia is another theme that keeps popping up during the golden age, particularly among writers in the orbit of John W. Campbell and Astounding Science Fiction. Isaac Asimov, who suffered from agoraphobia himself, addressed the issue several times, most notably in the Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw novels. Asimov's 1953 science fiction murder mystery The Caves of Steel is set on a future Earth that is pretty much the opposite of the world from Simak's City stories. Here, humanity has retreated to huge domed cities and is terrified of any open space. The 1956 sequel The Naked Sun, meanwhile, is set on a world of suburban sprawl that is even more extreme than that of "The Huddling Place". Here, too, humans live on huge estates tended by robots. But in The Naked Sun, the Solarians not only refuse to leave their palatial homes, they also cannot bear to be in the physical presence of other humans, even members of their own families. Indeed, the similarities between "The Huddling Place" and The Naked Sun are so pronounced that I wonder whether both stories aren't the result of one of John W. Campbell's infamous writing prompts.

It's also interesting to view both "The Huddling Place" and The Naked Sun in the light of the trend towards suburbification after World War II. Because in the 1950s and 1960s, people all over the western world really did turn their back on cities in favour of suburbs built on what had been fields and meadows only a decade before. Of course, those people were far more likely to end up in a Levittown shoebox or a "garden city" housing estate than on a huge multigenerational estate like the Webster home. On the other hand, the McMansions that were popular in the US from the 1980s into the early 2000s do seem to show a trend towards a scaled down version of the Webster home. And while humans post WWII did not actually succumb crippling agoraphobia, people did stop going to cinemas, theatres, restaurants, bars, etc… for a while, preferring to stay at home and watch TV and have dinner parties in the privacy of their own homes. Suburbification is mainly associated with the postwar era, but now I wonder whether those trends were already noticeable in the 1930s and early 1940s and whether stories like "The Huddling Place" and The Naked Sun were a type of "If this goes on…" speculation.

In the real world, the trend towards suburbification and people retreating into the privacy of their homes eventually reversed, as younger people moved back into the cities, once derelict city neighbourhoods became extremely desirable places to live, while some suburbs withered and became places for old people, families and those who can't afford to live in the city. Just as people started going out again and cinemas, theatres, restaurants, etc… rebounded. Furthermore, the postwar trend towards suburbification was a purely western phenomenon anyway. Beyond the western world, people continue to flock to the cities, because that's where the jobs, the opportunities and the facilities are.

Indeed, the world Simak describes in "The Huddling Place" and the other City stories is pretty much unsustainable. It's simply not possible for people to take up so much space, unless the world population has been drastically reduced. And in fact, I always assumed that only a minority of people, mainly in the US, lived like the Websters, while life and cities go on as normal in the rest of the world. And considering how very few women there are in the City stories, I also wonder whether women didn't continue as normal, maybe even happy that the men had walled themselves in.

In many ways, "The Huddling Place" is a very American story. Now many of the stories I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project feel very American, but "The Huddling Place" is an extreme example, since the story's idea of gracious country living is very American phenomenon. "The Huddling Place" is an early example of what Joanna Russ would eventually call galactic suburbia science fiction and one of the comparatively few that was written by a male author.

Since "The Huddling Place" is a Clifford D. Simak story, it is beautifully written. The nature descriptions do their best to make the reader understand just why Jerome loves his plot of land so much. The panic attack scenes are visceral and will bring back unpleasant memories to anybody who ever suffered a panic attack.

In fact, "The Huddling Place" feels more like a work of mid-century literary fiction than like the sort of hard science fiction normally found in the pages of Astounding. Maybe that is why John W. Campbell felt the need to add a blurb announcing that this story is an important extrapolation of social trends. In fact, if Jenkins and the other robots had been replaced by human servants, the spaceport with an airport or train station and if the dying Juwain had resided in a different country rather than on Mars, "The Huddling Place" wouldn't have felt out of place in a 1940s issue of the Saturday Evening Post or the New Yorker.

A tale about crippling agoraphobia and the dangers of suburbification with rather sinister undertones for such a quiet story.

Retro Review: "When the Bough Breaks" by Lewis Padgett a.k.a. Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore

"When the Bough Breaks" is a novelette by Lewis Padgett, one of the many pen names of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, which was first published in the November 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and is therefore eligible for the 1945 Retro Hugos. The story may be found online here.

Warning: Spoilers beyond this point! We also need a trigger warning for harm done to a child here.

"When the Bough Breaks" is the story of the Calderon family: physicist Joe, his wife Myra and their eighteen-months-old son Alexander. The Calderons are amazed to have found a good apartment close to the university where Joe works and for a reasonable rent, too. Apparently, the housing market was already tight in 1944, even though the US housing stock was not being diminished by World War II bombings, unlike in Europe.

A neighbour informs the Calderons that no one lasts long in apartment 4-D. It's not exactly haunted, but there are unusual visitors, strange little men who keep asking for a man no one knows. And indeed, the Calderons have barely moved in, when the doorbell rings and four little men with huge heads and wizened faces stand outside.

"Are you Joseph Calderon?" they ask Joe. When Joe says yes, the little inform him that they are the descendants of his son Alexander, that Alexander is a superbaby and that the little men are there to educate him.

Joe doesn't even have time to react, before the little men storm the apartment and gather around baby Alexander. They claim that they come from the year 2450 and that Alexander himself has sent them back in time to educate him. Oh yes, and Alexander is an immortal superhuman.

The Calderons do what everybody would have done in that situation, they throw the little men out. Or at least they try, for the little men paralyse them with some kind of futuristic technology. Then the little men give Alexander some educational toys from the future. Alexander isn't particularly keen on the toys, but the little men are extremely patient. Once they're satisfied that Alexander has learned enough, they leave.

The Calderons are understandably panicked – after all, Alexander is just a baby, a perfectly normal baby and not homo superior. So, to avoid a further visitation by the little men, they go to the nearest theatre to watch a movie, taking Alexander along. But in the middle of the film, Alexander vanishes. The terrified Calderons head home, where they find Alexander happily playing with the little men and one of their educational toys.

The little men try to stun the Calderons again, but Joe says there is no need, they will cooperate. And the little men don't want to hurt Joe and Myra either, because they know how important a stable home environment is to Alexander's development.

So Joe and Myra watch as the little men play with Alexander, while Bordent, the leader of the little men, explains that Alexander is the first homo superior, mutated because both his parents worked with radioactive material and were exposed to radiation. Bordent also explains that Alexander's abilities were not recognised until he was thirty. So the future Alexander sent Bordent and his companions into the past to find his infant self and give him an education suitable for a superhuman.

Bordent also explains that because Alexander is a superhuman, he will mature more slowly than regular human children. Until he is twenty, Alexander will physically remain at the state of an eight-year-old. Mentally, he will be higher developed than his parents, but irrational like a small child.

From that day on, the Calderons resign themselves to the daily visitation of the little men. They also note mental and physical changes in Alexander. After four days, he begins to talk and after a week, Alexander is able to hold conversations, though his speech is sometimes slurred, his baby muscles and teeth not yet ready for talking. Also like any baby, Alexander displays irritating behaviour, made even more irritating by the fact that he can talk. And so he demands milk and assembles the educational toys from the future into strange structures. But when Joe asks what Alexander is building, Alexander just says "No" over and over again. Alexander also decides to practice vomiting and crying and generally turns into a tiny dictator. At one point, he even tells Joe (whom he refuses to call "father") that he and Myra are primitive biological necessities.

Alexander becomes steadily more difficult to handle. He learns to teleport, communicate telepathically and dispense electric shocks and promptly decides to try out those new skills on his parents. He also stops sleeping – it's an artificial habit anyway, Bordent explains. By now, we and the Calderons are beginning to suspect that Alexander has a great and glorious future as a comic book supervillain ahead of him. However, Bordent assures Joe and Myra that Alexander is only playing and that he didn't mean to hurt his parents. And no, spanking Alexander is not the answer.

While on the subject of spanking, the portrayal of parenthood and child rearing in this story are seriously dated. Not only does Joe consider spanking his admittedly tyrannical kid, no, Joe and Myra also drink larger quantities of hard alcohol around their baby (and Joe considers giving Alexander some alcohol at one point, when Alexander demands "a drink", before Joe realises that he means milk), they smoke around their baby and take him the cinema at one point to see a movie that very likely is not appropriate for young children. To be fair, none of these things were uncommon for parents of young children well into the 1970s and beyond, but viewed from a 2020 POV they are jarring. Though it's also interesting that Alexander berates his parents for smoking around him, because it's bad for his lungs, which is probably the most prescient thing in the whole story.

After a few months of living with an ever more dictatorial superbaby, Joe and Myra are at their wits' end. Human may have a nigh endless supply of parental love and tolerance, but even that has its limits and Joe and Myra have just about reached them.

Myra quietly wonders whether they're really the first parents to deal with a homo superior baby. She finally decides that no, they're probably not the first. However, Alexander is the first homo superior, so something must have happened to the others. And Joe and Myra as well as the reader can imagine only too clearly what it was.

The bough finally break one night, when Alexander breaks open a cupboard and retrieves an object, a blue egg, that the little men had locked away, because it might be dangerous to Alexander. Joe and Myra know the object is dangerous and that they should intervene, but somehow they cannot bring themselves to do it. Besides, Alexander probably wouldn't let them intervene anyway.

And so it happens what has to happen. Alexanders blows himself up and all that remains are his smouldering baby shoes. Joe and Myra realise that Alexander is gone and that since Alexander never grew up into the first homo superior, Bordent and his companions never travelled back in time either and the whole thing ever happened. Joe and Myra are more relieved than anything, while Myra pities the parents of whoever the first homo superior to reach adulthood may be. We suspect that parents of Charles Xavier, Erich Lehnsherr a.k.a. Magneto and Magnifico a.k.a. The Mule might sympathise.

"When the Bough Breaks" is a deeply disturbing story – after all, it is basically a story about parents who kill their kid through neglect. What makes the story even more disturbing by the fact that it's largely a humorous story closer in tone to Henry Kuttner's Gallegher stories about an inept inventor than to Kuttner and Moore's more serious and sombre works such as their other 1944 science fiction novella "The Children's Hour" or C.L. Moore's solo works of the period like "No Woman Born" or Judgment Night. The cartoony interior art by A. Williams further reinforces the feeling that "When the Bough Breaks" was intended as a humorous story.

Children, marriage and family life are not a common theme in golden age (or for that matter contemporary) science fiction, though these themes show up quite frequently in the works of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, e.g. in "Mimsy Were the Borogroves", the 1944 Retro Hugo winner for best novelette. The fact that Kuttner and Moore were a married couple that mostly wrote together certainly has something to do with the marriage and family focus in many of their works. In many ways, Kuttner/Moore stories from the 1940s such as "Mimsy Were the Borogroves", "The Twonky" or "When the Bough Breaks" already look ahead at what Joanna Russ called Galactic Suburbia science fiction, silver age science fiction with domestic themes often written by women writers. Because thematically and stylistically "When the Bough Breaks" is very reminiscent of the Galactic Suburbia stories of the 1950s and early 1960s, even though the Calderons live in a city apartment rather than a suburb.

There are further parallels between "Mimsy Were the Borogroves" and "When the Bough Breaks". In both stories, someone from the far future interferes with the development of children in the present. And in both stories, educational toys from the future cause psychological and physiological changes in children that their parents cannot understand. "When the Bough Breaks" is a much darker story than "Mimsy Were the Borogroves", though. And "Mimsy" is not exactly a happy story. However in "Mimsy Were the Borogroves", the narrative is on the side of the children. In "When the Bough Breaks", the narrative is squarely on the side of the parents who wind up killing their child in the end.

We know a lot about Kuttner and Moore's writing process, but comparatively little about their marriage and family life, when they were not writing. However, in a letter dated May 1943, John W. Campbell mentioned that C.L. Moore had missed deadlines because of a difficult pregnancy, which means that Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore were parents of a baby at the time this story was written. I now wonder whether there isn't a kernel of truth to this story and whether "When the Bough Breaks" was at least partly inspired by Kuttner and Moore's experiences with a fussy and difficult baby.

ETA: According to Paul Fraser and Rebecca Lohr, C.L. Moore had a miscarriage, which sheds a different light on the story.

It's also telling that the behaviour and feelings of the Calderons, though caused by the fact that their child is a superbaby, very much mirrors the symptoms of postpartum depression, a condition that was known long before the 1940s, even if it wasn't yet referred to by that name. At once point, Kuttner and Moore also use the term "autistic" to describe Alexander's behaviour in what may be one of the first uses of that term in fiction. As I mentioned in my review of Allison V. Harding's "Guard in the Dark", Leo Kanner's and Hans Asberger's pioneering research into autism spectrum disorder happened in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It's highly likely Kuttner and Moore (and Harding) were familiar with Kanner's paper, which was first published in 1943. It's also telling that the visitation by Bordent and the little men begins when Alexander is eighteen months old, i.e. at the age where symptoms of autism spectrum disorder first manifest.

Another term that is used in connection with Alexander is "homo superior", a term which was coined by Olaf Stapledon in the 1935 science fiction novel Odd John, though nowadays it is mainly associated with the X-Men comics. It is well known that the silver age Marvel Comics in general and the X-Men in particular were inspired by golden age science fiction and that the literary predecessors of the X-Men may be found in Stapledon's Odd John, A.E. van Vogt's Slan, Isaac Asimov's The Mule and particularly Wilmar H. Shiras' Children of the Atom. As a fan of both, I have been aware of the connections between the X-Men comics and golden age science fiction for a long time now. However, I found the X-Men at around the same time I encountered The Mule and long before I tracked down Slan or Odd John let alone Children of the Atom. My image of mutants was that of a feared and hated minority – The Mule notwithstanding. And though The Mule is undoubtedly a villain (but then so is Magneto), I was disturbed by the anti-mutant slant of the story. It took me a long time to realise that The Mule was the rule rather than the exception and that homo superior in golden age science fiction were more likely to be supervillains rather than misunderstood heroes and that these were the very stories and tropes that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and later Chris Claremont were reacting to with the X-Men.

Alexander from "When the Bough Breaks" is another example of a negatively portrayed homo superior from golden age science fiction, though he never gets to grow up into a fully-fledged supervillain. And since Alexander unwittingly brings about his own demise by sending Bordent and his companions back into the past, "When the Bough Breaks" is also a very early example of the "grandfather paradox", which was actually coined in the very same year by French writer René Barjavel in his science fiction novel Le Voyageur Imprudent a.k.a. Future Times Three.

"When the Bough Breaks" is certainly an interesting story. It is also well written, but then we know that Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore could write. And unlike some other stories I reviewed for this project, it has been reprinted several times over the decades and is therefore hardly an obscure story.
However, I really can't get beyond that fact that "When the Bough Breaks" is essentially a story about infanticide. Worse, the infanticide is not punished, Joe and Myra don't even feel remorse. And yes, Alexander was well on his way to becoming a total disaster, but Joe and Myra could have done something before he became a fully-fledged baby dictator such as throwing out Bordent and his companions, for example. But instead, they kill their own child through neglect, because he was too difficult to handle.

A highly disturbing story that IMO doesn't belong on the Retro Hugo ballot, simply because of the highly problematic subject matter and the way it is handled.