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 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. ( )

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 the more interesting scenes, conversations, etc. along the way. Some of the characters, I never really understood their significance/purpose.

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 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. ( )

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 “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. ( )

What an unusual book. The set up of humanity being yanked off the planet and put on another where they have to start from scratch (which they indeed do against all odds) would be an interesting settings but this story is about a group of feebleminded people left behind on earth. They manage to survive because they are being taken care of by all the benign robots left behind and in time they evolve amazing abilities while the robots embark on a search for the soul and god. ( )