As the tales unfold, they recount a world where humans, having developed superior transportation, have abandoned the cities and moved into the countryside.
In the beginning, the driving force for dispersion is the fear of nuclear holocaust, but eventually humans discover they simply prefer the pastoral lifestyle.
Themes familiar to Simak readers recur in these stories, notably the pastoral settings and the faithful dogs.
Bruce Webster surgically provides dogs with a means of speech and he gives them contact lenses for better vision.
A mutant called Joe invents a way for ants to stay active year-round in Wisconsin, so that they need not start over every spring.
Simak's version of Jupiter is a cold, windswept, and corrosive hell where only advanced technology allows the station to exist at all.
But there is a problem: Men permanently transformed to survive unaided on Jupiter's surface leave the station to gather data and inexplicably fail to return.
Some favor starting over as a completely different species capable of experiencing on Jupiter the simple bliss that humans have otherwise lost.
Ten thousand years in the future, Jenkins is provided with a new body so he can better serve the few remaining "websters".
The dogs intervene in nature and distribute food to wild animals, managing to end virtually all predation.
At this point, a wraithlike creature called a "cobbly" appears, having traveled from another world on the time thread.
The original eight stories were written and published during World War II and reflect the attitude that humans are unable to live at peace with their fellow beings.
Breaking through the wall of the city, he sees nothing but infinitely repeated versions of a single sculpture; a human boot kicking over an anthill.
[2] Boucher and McComas praised the volume as "a high-water mark in science fiction writing" adding, "Here is a book that caused these reviewers to chuck objective detachment out the window and emit a loud, partisan 'Whee!
'"[3] P. Schuyler Miller placed the novel among the best science fiction books of 1952, although he felt the added interstitial matter was inferior to the original stories.