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City Question 8: Epilogue
If your copy included the ninth story, Epilogue, then did it feel like it fit well with the rest of the stories? Was it a satisfying way to wrap everything up or would it have been better to have not included it at all. Was there any significance to mice being the final inheritors of the entire planet?
Comments
TBH I'd completely forgotten the content of Epilogue until you reminded me! So it obviously didn't have nearly as much personal impact as the other tales. Scanning back through it there seems to be a whole collection of different themes revisited - the mutant humans, wild robots, alien worlds, the humans, dogs and ants as well as the mice. Did Jenkins go or not go in the end? Is he trying to say goodbye to Andrew or Earth? I guess I don't really know what he wanted to say in this story except (as he says in the intro) that he wanted to create a kind of tribute to John Campbell and Astounding.
I didn't get this far, and don't remember it from 50 years ago....
I thought it was the best of the stories. Looking at the book from this point part of me sees all of the stories as being about our protagonists' inability to face either of the transcendent and imminent aspects of reality, and how that inability to understand messes up everything they (we) try to accomplish which, when combined with the realisation of personal finitude that we have not known (Poor Jenkins - seeing that robot and realising it was himself was quite a shock), produces ennui and meaninglessness. Maybe not Victor Frankl, but in the same neighbourhood.
Not saying that was Simak's intention when writing the early stories, but it is pretty clearly there by the end.
So that is part of why these compilations are different from novels, which are presented as robes made from whole cloth, rather than patchwork costuming that short stories weave. To return to @Apocryphal 's point about short stories and SF, I find the form more suited to describing a world which is simply too vast and deep to presented whole.
PS @kcaryths thanks for suggesting this book. Appreciated it.