A Choice of Gods

There is a melancholy tone to Clifford Simak’s A Choice of Gods, but that tone masks a deadpan sardonic humor. I don’t want to do spoilers, but as in his more famous City, the plot reveals a joke that, if it weren’t so sad, would make you shake your head and groan.

At the beginning of A Choice of Gods, we are told that by 2185, only a handful of people remain on Earth. Most of humanity either went away or was taken away, and no one left remembers how or why. The white midwestern family at the center of the story is scavenging old technology and rediscovering more bucolic ways of living. A small band of Indians has returned to an idealized state of nature. A group of Asimovian robots continues to be good and faithful servants. Some show more have formed a monastery. And there is a visiting alien on a quest for meaning.

We do eventually find out where the people went, and we do solve some of the mysteries of the universe, but like the end of City, we are left with a cosmic joke.

I have seen reviews that complain about the novel’s lack of scientific rigor and social realism, but that is like complaining that the animals in Aesop’s fables or Orwell’s Animal Farm shouldn’t talk. show less

3.75 (2nd read. Upgraded from my original rating of "high 2")

Natives have a psychic connection with trees grown from seeds brought to Earth from another planet; other humans telepathically sense an all-powerful, uncaring presence deep at the centre of the universe; a stranger from afar flees from an entity that may or may not be in his mind; some robots find purpose in servitude of their creators, some "wild" robots have their "project" for constructing a vast, technological idol, and other robots zealously adopt a Christianity outgrown by humanity: the reader is presented with a choice of gods and mythological narratives. Several characters journey in parallel with differing perspectives on faith, technology, and purpose. There are show more theories, there is conjecture, there are strong implications, but there is a lack of certainty and there are no "complete" answers.

A Choice of Gods, at 160 pages, is very short; but it has a gentle, quiet and pensive pace that would fool you into thinking it's quite a bit longer. On my initial read, some years ago, I was not sold. Now going in with different expectations, I liked it quite a lot. Simak has been a favourite of mine for a long time, but I also see him as a flawed writer. He still can't help but overexplain some ideas, and the dialogue can be stilted. But there are some wonderful passages here, the ideas are compelling, and thematically I think it allows for a lot of thought-food. How does the lack of technology and a prolonged lifespan impact humanity's development as a species? Can an ever-growing, ever-learning machine ever be considered "human" in some regard, if it mimics human life in every way except for its technological makeup? Can it outgrow its makers and become "more" human? What is a soul, and what does it mean to possess one? What are we to make of a religion, such as Christianity, when it only survives because a group of intelligent machines choose to keep it alive after humanity has long abandoned it?

Other themes touched upon include nature vs. technology, human evolution, and colonialism. Some people dismiss the book as anti-technology, but I think that's an extreme view. (Spoilers follow) This theme is not even apparent until towards the end of the book, where it is presented from two perspectives; both Earth inhabitants and ex-Earth inhabitants are shown to have developed in different ways, with very differing views, but both sides are also shown to be arrogant. There are soft parallels with H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, where the two separated remnants of humanity have been unalterably changed by their environments, although it is not a matter of class in this case. Those without technology learned to do without and evolved to make up for what they lacked in that field, whereas those that retained technology continued to progress and achieve similar goals through technological means. I also think the strong narrative regarding machines developing beyond their programming and almost becoming "more human" than their creators is enough to put to bed the idea that the novel is explicitly anti-technology. A Choice of Gods seems to present a choice of narratives, rather than hitting you over the head with just one. show less

Simak reliably wrote some of the most thoughtful, philosophical speculative fiction oit there. Readers interested in traditional, golden age scifi will likely be disappointed with this short novel. But those readers who are interested in the line where religion and science meet, in conversation about the gradiants of "humanity" will dig this book. Very similar vibe to Simak's _The City_.

Wow! The Grand Master was in rare form on this one. Though if you're looking for space battles and intergalactic wars this is not the book for you. It's a very profound, contemplative book on what the few hundred remaining people do - and become - on Earth after some unknown power suddenly removes all the rest of the (then) 8 billion. I actually feel like writing a paper about this book. How weird is that? But this book goes to the core of what the best SF is about: what it really means to be human, is there a cosmic order to things, and where do we fall within it?
My favorite quote is on page 107 of the Ballantine/Del Rey paperback 1982 printing: "And how much had he and the others lost when they turned their backs on magic? Belief, of show more course, and there might be some value to belief, although there was, as well, delusion, and did a man want to pay for the value of belief in the coinage of delusion?" A lot of thought went into this book, and I'm very sorry Mr. Simak is no longer with us to continue prodding our brains. show less

This is a very thought provoking piece of speculative fiction told in short chapters about several different characters living on earth at a time in the distant future when most humans have left the planet. The humans that remain are scattered far from each other and have extraordinary longevity. The story’s setting is somewhere in a wooded part of North America. There is a couple of descendants of European Americans living in an old stone house lined with bookshelves and full of books, and one of them, Jason Whitley, is keeping a journal that spans millennia, the reader get to read a few passages some from 2185 and one from 5152.

Nearby Jason’s stone house is also a small community of robots living and working hard to do what they show more can to help humans while struggling to keep Christianity from becoming extinct by living a monastic life and pondering theology. Occasionally, a tribe of local indigenous Americas stops by to visit with Jason, and there is a young woman who stops by to make use of his library; she’s been having mystical encounters with an oak tree. Into this woodland setting comes an indigenous pilgrim from the West Coast traveling east compelled by a desire to seek something, but he is unclear about his goal until he encounters the young woman and they both come upon an extraterrestrial alien that looks and acts like a can of squirming worms.

One of Simak’s repeated motifs in his fiction is presenting sentient robots who wonder if they have a soul, and in this late work of his, he provides a possible answer. show less

The plot line: Everyone, except for a handful, disappears from Earth. The few remaining people live for several thousand years and develop telepathy and teleportation.

This story didn’t go anywhere I expected, by starting 50 years after the disappearance, with one of the remaining few starting to keep a diary. The next surprise was not reading any of the entries until about 5,000 years later. At this point the actual story intersperses some relevant pages of the diary, lending some context to the current action. The current action involves a) the remaining Native Americans, who have returned to their roots and are now in emotional communion with nature—plants and animals; b) one group of robots that are captivated by the concept of show more “a soul” and are trying to consolidate all remaining religious information into a coherent concept of God/religion/soul; c) another group of robots who are constructing a super-robot to contain all knowledge—and basically come up with the answer to “life, the universe, etc.”; d) the husband and wife who have settled into their lives as the only remnants of a faded technological civilization and are content with a life lived with the aid of those robots that feel a desperate need to serve them; and e) the prodigy of the remaining Anglo-Americans who have teleported to, and settled, other star systems.

The real tension comes when the Disappeared are discovered and look like they’re returning to Earth.

It’s certainly an intriguing story line. In fact, I see elements of Olaf Stapledon’s “Starmaker” in the musings of the protagonist…and the use of Stapledon’s extended paragraphs. This makes for some occasional stodgy internal dialogue contemplating the purpose of life, religion, existence, the soul: “...in a strange way [the elderly] become sufficient to themselves. They need so very little and they care so very little. They climb the mountain [of years] no one else can see and as they climb the old, once-valued things they’ve carried all their lives tend to drop away and as they climb the higher the knapsack that they carry becomes emptier, but perhaps no less in weight than it had ever been, and the few things that are left in it, they find, with some amusement are those few indispensable belongings which they’ve gathered in a long lifetime of effort and of seeking.”

But fortunately Simak doesn’t overdo it. I can easily see how this story could have been spun out into much more than its almost 200 pages. But the author said what he wanted to say and left it there. show less

This was a weird one from Simak. Some really interesting depictions of characters on a depopulated earth and a look at one (im)possible evolutionary path for humanity. But it was all driven by the big reveal at the end of a God who was not the paternal, heavenly father, but an "other" alien presence who essentially does experiments when it depopulates earth separating humanity into different "test tubes" to see what happens.

I guess the various narrative threads never really hung together all that well for me (possibly the result of reading this before bed each night, so rarely long stretches of reading at a time). I felt like I was waiting for the payoff and when it came, it was "Well....ok?" I think the real payoff were just some of show more the more interesting scenes, conversations, etc. along the way. Some of the characters, I never really understood their significance/purpose. show less