Pun Salad

A few months back I set up a new reading project, somewhat jokingly (but accurately) dubbed the "Read all these Clifford D. Simak books I bought long ago and never read" project.

This 1972 novel was next in line, and now I'm wondering if this was a good idea at all. We are definitely in "not my cup of tea" area here. And I blame myself for that: A Choice of Gods was nominated for the "Best Novel" Hugo back then (losing to Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves; I guess it was a good year for gods).

But I waded through all 176 pages of my $1.25 "Berkeley Medallion" paperback. The language is very (what I call) flowery, it's mostly people (and robots) talking to each other, and not much actually happens.

But the story, as near as I understand it: one day in the 2100s, most of humankind simply vanished from Earth. For unknown reasons, a few hundred people are left behind (including some Native Americans). And a lot of those robots. Over millennia, they discover they've become pretty immortal. They develop telepathic skills (but not the robots). And they can teleport themselves to other worlds, if they so desire. It's a pretty pastoral existence.

But then it develops that humans might return to Earth (from wherever they've been), and there are fears that they'll redo the mistakes of the past, turning Earth (back) into a ecological wasteland, filled with discarded soda bottles or something. There was a sorta-resolution of this conflict at the end, which I read in the final pages yesterday, and have already forgotten.

Reader, the praise for this book at Amazon and elsewhere is fulsome. I'm giving it one lousy star at Goodreads, but (to repeat) that's me.