The Caves of Steel
The template SF-mystery hybrid and origin of fiction's first great human/robot buddy partnership; Baley and Daneel's successors staff half of modern SF television.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is City about?
Eight linked tales told around Doggish campfires far in the future, debating whether the legendary creature called Man ever really existed. Across twelve thousand years the Webster family and their robot butler Jenkins preside over humanity's quiet abdication: cities abandoned, bodies traded for Jovian ecstasy, the Earth bequeathed to uplifted dogs sworn never to kill. Simak wrote it in disgust at the Second World War, and its elegiac question — was Man worth the trouble? — is answered mostly by the loyalty of dogs and one very old robot. Gentle, strange and quietly devastating.
Why it matters
Winner of the International Fantasy Award (1953) and a cornerstone of pastoral SF; Jenkins is the genre's most touching robot this side of Asimov.
Read next
Foundation
Cornerstone of the future-history tradition; Hugo for Best All-Time Series (1966).
Blackout / All Clear
The two-volume novel swept the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards (2011); the culminating statement of Willis's argument that history is held together by unrecorded decency.