Scores around a 5.5/10. Notes from the book, in no particular order:

• As was more prevalent with science fiction in the past, City is a fix-up novel comprised of eight short stories. The connecting tissue is there for this one, but there are significant time jumps between the stories, and characters shift as well. The Cold War and nuclear war potential looms deep in the book.
• Simak must have really loved dogs.
• It is impressive how many ideas it packs in the short page count (~250 in my edition). Dogs gaining sentience. Human mutants. Humans transferring consciousness to robots (and back!). Our Solar System getting taken over by Man. The end of any form of lethal violence. Jupiter. Impressive, this book coming fresh out of the Cold War era.
• The first tale, City, is probably the one with most grounded feet, biggest political and sociological message. An ode to the simple life, and against the insanity of cities. It did resonate.
• As with most science fiction of the era ¹, characters are generally non-memorable.
• “For a man will invent a bow and arrow, no matter what you do”
• Ultimately the book suffers from too much tell, don’t show. With that I mean that as a reader you are not participating in the action (there is barely any), you are just being told cool moments and happenstances in the sidelines. This made the last third of the book a bit of a slog for me.