POST-DOG TALES ABOUT HUMAN EXTINCTION

Clifford D. Simak’s fixup novella City (1952) should be re-read as one of the first pieces of post-humanist science-fiction writing. This article argues that naming the book after the first story, and not after the fourth one, “Desertion”, was misleading because the book is not one of the “urban science-fiction stories”. City rather explores what would happen if people had the opportunity of instantly entering paradise (Nick Bostrom’s “post-human mode of being”), even at the cost of deserting the human body. A further hypothesis suggested here is that John W. Campbell, the founding father of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, initially refused to publish “Desertion” and never published City’s final story, “The Simple Way”, in his iconic Astounding Science Fiction magazine, because the post-humanist character of these stories contradicted his “classical” view of science fiction.