"A technological civilization is never satisfied. It is based on profit and progress, its own brand of progress. It must expand or die."Scathing rebuke of the devastating effects of human civilization on the Earth and all that it comes within its dominion, told in the rich yet economic style of one of the great golden age grand masters. And yet, Simak imparts a message of hope, that under the right circumstances mankind might evolve to live in harmony with his surroundings.

The Rapture without the Apocalypse. Sometimes being left behind ain't so bad. Somebody call a do over and really ment it.

It has been funny reading the irritated, disgusted, sometimes outraged reactions towards this anti-science & technology novel - reviews written mainly by my fellow science fiction nerds. I guess I can understand the sour reactions, as Simak is pretty much saying that technology is for dumb-asses who don't want to grow as human beings. That must really rankle anyone who loves technology LOL! I guess for me it would be like reading a book that is all about how reading books is for simpletons.But r...

A Choice of Gods is classic Simak. Who? Right. Clifford Simak is one of the champions of early science fiction. He is credited with creating the “pastoral science fiction” genre, sci-fi set in the countryside. Heinlein once said, “to read science fiction is to read Simak. Anyone who doesn’t like Simak doesn’t like science fiction.” It would be hard to find many who agree with that sentiment today. Though his book, Way Station, won the Hugo, and four other books, including A Choice of Gods, were

Aside from a rather good tale called "The Visitor" published in 1980, I'd only read a few early works from Simak - 1940's and early sixties. "A Choice of Gods" was published in 1972 and was nominated for a Hugo - it lost to Asimov's "The Gods Themselves" ("Damnation!" Simak must have thought when he saw that he was in competition with the 'Good Doctor' of all writers, and with a book with a similar title!) What it also has in common with Asimov's work is, in part, the 'is a self-aware robot a se...

This is a strange mix of SF ideas and 70s attitudes: one day almost all mankind vanishes from Earth, leaving only Native Americans plus a few whites. The once who remained are blessed (?) with long lives, absence of diseases and even paranormal abilities. I read it as a part of monthly reading for December 2021 at Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels group. The book was nominated for Hugo in 1973 but lost to The Gods Themselves.So, the story starts with a kind of rupture and remaining people adjust...

3.5 starsThis was my fourth Simak novel, the first was Way Station. I read Way Station for a sci-fi class in college and it was my professor's favorite sci-fi novel. A Choice of Gods has similar themes of loneliness and distant mysterious aliens like his other books. Mankind contemplates its future in the universe is the other common thread. The vibe of hopelessness and uncertainty was well done here. So thought provoking but there was very little drama or vivid imagery relative to Simak's other...

A Choice of Gods was nominated for Hugo in 1973, but did not win. In the early 80s, I was reading through the backlog of Clifford Simak novels.

Full review: https://sciencefictionruminations.com..."Nominated for the 1972 Hugo Award for Best NovelClifford D. Simak’s A Choice of Gods (1971) is a flawed but intriguing novel. Simak’s renowned for his original anti-technology pastoral visions. His science fiction (replete with unusual aliens) is more likely to intersect our future world in the environs of the rural farm, the depopulated/gutted earth covered [...]"

It was fun to read A Choice of Gods and Heart of Darkness at once. Seemingly, the humanity suffers a great blow when people almost disappear from Earth in an event referred to as the Disappearance. The ones who left develop a bunch of supernatural abilities including the lifespans of thousands of years as a trade-off for all the technology lost. However, it is still a civilization aspiring to a prosperity by fusion of the mind control over the material world with some good values and ends. The D...

The "People" and their high-tech are very eeevil. Earth's indigenous natives have been raped and decimated. A mysterious UBER Intelligence who presides at The University of Central Universe (UCU) is forced to step in and, uh, remove said eeevil People and resettle them to unexplainable triplet exoplanets. Well, except for the nature and library loving types...who are BFFs with the natives...and mysteriously live longer and look better than Robert Redford and Jane Fonda. Oh... And there's first c...

I have to say this story defeated me. I thought I knew what was going on until just near the end when the whole thing blew up in my face. Too metaphysical for me, I guess.

Earth in 2135 has over 8 billion people (wishful thinking). One day, all but a few are gone, apparently left to find other worlds to live in (as earth is overpopulated).Left behind with the few people are many robots.The humans don't have the knowledge to maintain and develop the existing technology and actually don't have a need either. The robots are still there to serve them and there are plenty of them to spare.In addition, the humans left behind seem to age very slowly.The native Americans

Boring, with absolutely no payoff, and mildly insulting actually. It boils down to basically the dual cliches of technophobia and the old classic trope "Native Americans lived in harmony with the earth until the evil white man ruined everything." I kept reading hoping for something beyond those two themes, but that's all there is. The first one is galling enough as he doesn't present one unique idea as to why technology is a bad thing, it's just the same shit you've heard a billion times before,...

Another masterful story from one of the greats (in my opinion) of classic science fiction, probably more properly classified today as 'speculative fiction'.In A Choice Of Gods, Simak starts the reader off with a future world scenario where,when Earths population was more than eight billion, suddenly one day, most of them were gone. Not dead, no wars or catastrophes, just most people vanished. Slowly, over time it became obvious that in addition to the reduced population a major change had occurr...

Reading Simak is often like reading an alien author; his writing is strangely different from everything that has gone before. There are no villains; his planet Earth is very much an idyllic forest, at least the part that the main characters know, and completely prosaic… except that every time you get caught up in the normalness of it, he mentions the music trees gearing up for a concert.Except for that, this is very much just another entry in the post-apocalyptic socialist paradise genre; that i...

Most of the people of Earth have disappeared leaving only a rich, white family, a tribe of Native Americans, and another small group of people who are not really introduced. And, the robots. Of course, the robots who were only ever made to serve humans. The remaining whites, the Whitneys, have developed parapsychic abilities and now travel among the stars without the aid of any machinery. The Natives have returned to the old way of nomadic communion with the Earth. Of the robots, some serve the

I have liked the novels of Clifford D. Simak ever since I read Way Station and City. A Choice of Gods is in many ways similar to the former book, being set in a rural area with a threat of invasion -- not by aliens -- but by the descendants of the technologically-leaning Earthlings who left Earth thousands of years ago. Remaining on Earth are a few humans who have never left for other star systems, including a few American Indians and a highly developed society of robots. The Indians avoid the r...

Storyline: 3/5Characters: 3/5Writing Style: 4/5World: 3/5When one thinks of leftist science fiction, it is Ursula K. Le Guin that comes to mind or perhaps Kim Stanley Robinson or newer Hugo award winners or some from that turn of the century British space opera clique. 1904-born, rural Wisconsin raised, and Midwestern public school and newspaper employed Clifford D. Simak seems an unlikely candidate. At its core, A Choice of Gods gives us a fundamental juxtaposition - a choice of our gods, as it...

This is an older sci fi novel that includes philosophy about things like faith and technology which are pretty common themes.Sometimes I don't have to agree with the main point of the book to really like it and this is the case here. The idea of technology vs living with nature is a bit overdone and especially in our time I roll my eyes at ideas that natives are the ones who do it right while the rest of us with all that technology and progress are the ones who know nothing. But in this book I d...