Five Bubble Book Club discussion

I have got the audiobook from audible, and also an overdrive ebook from the minuteman library.

Listened to the first story today.
I found it surprisingly relevant to today's world. Specifically, how transportation and telecommute will change cities. Are cities doomed to fail?
I have been to Detroit several times and I did think about those topics a bit but this little story offered some new angles.

Finished the book today.
So... I guess this is annihilism ?

annihilism, n.
The intermodern successor of postmodernism's paradigm of deconstructionism; modernism's magical realism or absurdism; and Romanticism's gothism or baroqueism.
-- Urban Dictionary

I'd just say that Simak was being fatalistic about the human condition -- or the ants for that matter. ;-)

Recently I read a little bit of popular science:
Consciousness and the Social Brain
This researcher thinks that there is nothing special about human consciousness, and awareness is kind of an illusion. This theory works well with my long-held opinion that it is not that big of a deal if robots pick up the baton from the human race.
Usually, this would be the part I would like to discuss most.
However, the COVID situation just made the "abandon the city" part sounds too real, and I couldn't stop thinking about it recently.

The agoraphobia described in City's "Huddling Place" is certainly more a part of many people's lives now that in-person interactions pose a risk of fatality.