I just got bored and quit. ( )

Robo-Pope. Clever and funny - the book, not the robo-pope, he barely gets a look in but that's the peculiar detail that made me pick up the book so maybe it'll work for you too. You won't regret it although it's fair to warn you it's more of a wistful and gentle sci-fi tale than a life changing epiphany the theme would suggest. ( )

Simak characters speak with a gracious mid-20th century mid-western formality of speech. Most
of the characters speak similarly. There is little to tell between them, but it is enough. I like his short sentences. Each sentence is a complete, clear thought. I think a fine radio play might be made of this story, which is largely dialogue. What little is not, could be made so, or assigned to a narrator.

Clifford Simak has always struck me as a gentle writer. I'm not quite sure what I mean because people kill and are killed, hurt and are mistreated, and there is danger physical and ideological. But always there seems to be a goodness in everything and things work out. Everyone is likeable, villians can be pitied. There is mystery: enough is explained, but never everything. ( )

I'm of two minds on this one. It's quite strong on showing us some pretty wonderful worldbuilding, a robot Pope with robot Cardinals on a super-remote world in a distant future, spending many thousands of years trying to come to the idea of a perfect religion.

In this respect, it's perfect Simak. A lot of crystalline exploration of the idea of the Holy and what is good and all in all, it's a pretty awesome treatment of AIs (hereforeto referred to as robots) doing right by themselves and all the other races in the universe. If it feels like a nostalgic homage to the humans that created them in the distant past, then you're right. Most of the robots alive today only have vague ideas about humanity.

I think Simak does the subject nice justice, capturing an island of peace and contemplation only available to robots because those pesky humans always seem to f*** it up. :) Of course, the book doesn't end here. The search for Heaven takes a high-math turn and ancient beings who may or may not be a species of angels have been watching over this distant world and with the help of a few humans and a baby (something), the adventure makes a schism in the robot religion.

This is all pretty cool. So why did I knock off a star?

The writing, actually. Sometimes it skims where it could dive deep and the characters and dialogue were kinda lame at parts. *shrug* It annoyed me because the other concepts and turns were pretty damn high quality. :) ( )

Clifford Simak wrote some very entertaining science fiction novels, including a few that may reasonably be regarded as classics in the field. This, unfortunately, is not one of them.

The novel centers on an order of religious robots on a planet they've named Vatican-17, who have attempted to build a robotic pope who will be truly infallible, and who are using human psychics to search for Heaven, which might or might not be a real place you can actually visit.

All of which sounds like it could perhaps make for some interesting musings, or maybe for some satirical humor, on the subjects of artificial intelligence and religion. It does neither, though. Instead, it seems to mostly consist of characters sitting around telling each other the same stuff over and over and over, none of which was particularly interesting in the first place. Neither the world nor the theology of these robots ever feels very well-developed, and the plot is thin enough that the whole thing could probably have been cut down from 300+ pages to novella-length, and been the better for it. And then there's the ending, which kind of feels like it belongs in another story entirely (but not necessarily a better one). ( )