Epilog and Other Stories
Introduction: Clifford D. Simak: The Memory of Man
«This series [the City stories] … was filled with the gentleness and the kindness and the courage that I thought were needed in the world… I made the dogs and robots the kind of people I would like to live with.
And the vital point is this: that they must be dogs or robots, because people were not that kind of folks’.»
Clifford D. Simak’s book City—perhaps the best known of all his works—became immediately notable in its time for its development of a «future history» in which dogs attained intelligence, robots became independent beings … and mankind vanished from the Earth. And before the end of the City stories (I am including «Epilog,» which appears later in this volume, in that canon), even the dogs are gone.
A large portion of Cliff Simak’s science fiction stories—perhaps one-quarter of them—featured, or at least mentioned, robots. (In fact, even one of Cliff’s western short stories, «Barb Wire Brings Bullets!» (see volume six of this series, The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak) actually used the word «robot»—not as a reference to the creatures we now think of as «surrogate humans,» but in a probably unthinking and anachronistic use of the word to demonstrate a wounded man’s inability to think…) Although Cliff Simak wrote a lot of stories that featured or mentioned robots, he did not make them all the same sort of creature. Readers generally remember those of his robots who were portrayed as a better sort of human, uncorrupted by the baser sort of instincts and needs of the human race—«the kind of being that a human should be, but very seldom is.» In other Simak stories, robots were little better than machines, mere mechanisms lacking personality.
The body of the typical Simak robot represents a triumph of human technology; but Cliff Simak very often housed in those bodies the souls of gentle, naïve, childlike people—creating, perhaps, a synthesis that could alleviate mankind’s fear of technology, by creating an appropriate balance of man and technology. This is particularly striking in the cases of the many robots Cliff portrayed as having an interest in religion (such as the robot in the novel Time and Again, who charged all of humanity with having disregarded its own Commandments, or the robots in Project Pope and A Choice of Gods, who set up their own religious organizations because humans seemed no longer interested in doing so), or the other robots shown as happy-go-lucky beings whose interests never extended beyond their work or the simplest of pleasures, as in the short story «Installment Plan» (see volume one).
On the other hand, there was Nellie, in the story «Ogre» (see volume one), who literally beat a human being to death! (Nellie is also the only one of Simak’s robots to which he gave a female name, and for which he used the pronoun «she.»
The stories that, with their interstitial materials, make up the book City have many threads; and one of the longest, and most important, is the biography of the robot Jenkins. (There is another robot of that name in a different Simak story, but that is not the same character.) As it happened, Jenkins did not appear at all in most of the early City stories. But if Jenkins «lived» (can robots be said to live?), he lived a long, long life; and he evolved through the course of the book. Until, by the time of «Epilog,» the very last of the stories, Jenkins seems to be the only animate being living on Earth (aside from the mice for which he feels a certain fondness).
Jenkins spent much of his long life trying to take care, first, of the Websters, the members of the human family he served when he was just a colorless mechanical butler. Later, when the humans left Earth and the last Webster went to his eternal sleep, Jenkins took over the Websters’ duty of guiding the civilization of the intelligent dogs. And when those, too, were gone, all he had left was the memory of having been «proud to be a Webster.» But he also realized that he had lived too long; he was not able to forget all that had happened and all the sadness it contained.
Long before people and dogs abandoned Earth, Jenkins had begun taking on human characteristics. He had a metal body that never wore out, and yet he sat in chairs—in fact, he liked to rock; and when engaged in thought, he developed a habit of rubbing his chin …
In fact, the question might be raised whether Jenkins himself had become another of the tragedies and failures that followed, one after another, through the course of the book. He bound himself to the Webster family and to Webster House and the Earth; and then he put his faith in the dogs after concluding that humans were a failure … only to see them, too, follow the fate of the humans. Did Jenkins replay in his life the rise and fall of the Websters … and all humans?
And then the past came back to find Jenkins, when some of the other robots who had once lived on Earth returned to see what had happened in the time since they had left. One of those was Andrew, who appears in the story «The Trouble with Ants,» volume thirteen. Upon learning that dogs had largely forgotten Men, Andrew tells a dog: «I suppose Jenkins kept you afraid of men. For Jenkins was a smart one. He knew that you must start afresh. He knew that you must not carry the memory of Man as a dead weight on your necks.»
«And we,» Andrew continued, «are nothing more than the memory of Man.»
In Cliff Simak’s very first novel, Cosmic Engineers, one of the Engineers, robots found by men on a far planet, contrasts his fellows with humans, saying «… we are not driven by restless imagination … imagination that will not let one rest until all has been explained.»
Robots in Simak stories were created to work. They knew it, and they were happy—if they could be thought of as «happy.» And is that the problem with the humans in City? Is the problem that led to the end of humans on Earth the fact that they did not know, or had forgotten—or even never had—a purpose, a job? (See the contrast, in the short story «I Am Crying All Inside» (see volume one), between the last robots left on Earth and the degraded humans they took care of.)
«He was doing for a Webster once again,» Jenkins realizes in «Hobbies» (see volume eleven). «A warm peace came upon him, the close and intimate peacefulness of the old days when he had trotted, happy as a terrier, on his many errands.
«For he was doing for a Webster once again.»
Jenkins, at that point, was able to savor his oldest memories. But in the end, memories of mankind did not last, and did no one any good.
David W. Wixon
Lulu
The spaceship was a robot, and a robot can be too human, making it a danger—particularly when it thinks it is in love. «Lulu,» she was called, and some readers have found her intriguing; but I myself am irritated by such irrationality, which I find insulting to womankind. And I also found myself remembering Hal in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. And that in turn led me to think about all those Frankenstein stories, as well as all the other stories about technology gone awry.
«Lulu» originally appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, in the June 1957 issue.
—dww
The machine was a lulu.
That’s what we called her: Lulu.
And that was our big mistake.
Not the only one we made, of course, but it was the first, and maybe if we hadn’t called her Lulu, it might have been all right.