City (Clifford Simak)

[***]

I liked this. It's really four long short stories (or three stories and a novella?) based on the premise that in the far future man has departed the earth for a better place, dogs have inherited the earth (with the help of the robots man built for them) and man has become the stuff of myth and legend.

The downside of the book is that you have to be willing to put up with early fifties anachronisms like impossible sociology (everyone moves to huge suburban estates, commutes by helicopter and communicates by television) and completely speculative science (something does live under all that gas pressure on Jupiter and man can be surgically altered to adapt to the same environment). Fascinating.