This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I had never read.
A fantastic concept and you could really tell that Simak had a background in newspapers. His writing style was clear and easy to understand.
PREMISE:
For over a thousand years on a planet far away from Earth, robots and humans had been collaborating to located a 'one true faith' loosely based on Catholicism.
Humans called 'Searchers' are used to 'visit' different dimensions. An old woman named Mary claims that she has visited 'Heaven'. She goes back for another visit and is expelled from Heaven. Later it's determined that it was not the real Heaven.
This 'area' of the galaxy was populated by very ancient philosopher beings. They were in the forms of 'bubbles' and 'haystacks'.
This is where the novel broke down for me. These beings were just too weird. The novel could have really taken a philosophical turn, but instead it became kind of clownish.
From the book's page at Amazon:
"Robot believers at the far end of the galaxy endeavor to create a true religion, but their efforts could be shattered by a shocking revelation. Far in the future, on the remote planet End of Nothing, sentient robots are engaged in a remarkable enterprise. They call their project Vatican-17: an endeavor to create a truly universal religion presided over by a pope, whose extreme godliness and infallible artificial intelligence are fed by telepathic human Listeners who psychically delve into the mysteries of the universe. But the great and holy mission could be compromised by one shocking revelation that threatens to inspire serious crises of faith among the spiritual, truth-seeking robotic acolytes while tearing them into warring religious factions; for the Listener Mary is claiming that she has just discovered Heaven.
There are those among the Clifford D. Simak faithful who consider Project Pope his masterpiece. But whether the crowning literary achievement of a multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science-fiction Grand Master or merely another brilliant novel of speculative fiction to stand among his many, Simak's breathtaking search for God in the machine ingeniously blends science and spirituality in a truly miraculous way that few science fiction writers, if any, have been able to accomplish."
Random comments from Goodreads:
"Not sure why it happens that the man (Dr. Jason) Tennyson and the woman Jill (Roberts, journalist) arrived on this planet just as the robots' Search for Knowledge and for a constructed Faith also arrived. But so it did, and so we learn about these robots who are interested in humans and in relitions, and about humans, and about a bunch of other truly alien aliens."
"Tennyson is running from people, so he stows away on a ship going to a planet called The End of Nowhere. Arriving there with another passenger, a reporter, he settles down in a society called Vatican. The planet was built by human made robots and loosely based on the Catholic system. When a human "listener" thinks she has found heaven, the robots have to determine its validity and the split between factions begins to escalate. Meanwhile, after befriending a being called The Whisperer, he and the woman, Jill travel to strange new worlds of equation beings and the place that turns out NOT to be Heaven."
"Running from the middle of nowhere (the feudal planet Gutshot) after his patron dies and he’s afraid he’s going to be forced to take the fall for it, Dr. Jason Tennyson takes the first ship out and ends up at the end of nowhere—the planet End of Nothing.
End of Nothing has one settlement: Vatican, a robot project to discover the one true faith, preferably one that will include robots.
This is a typically nice Simak story, with friendly characters, who despite being friendly all have different motivations that cause conflict. Stories like this or Way Station are a refreshing change of pace. There are also some neat ideas here. Just as humans find it difficult to lose a reverence for their own hypothetical creator, robots find it difficult to lose their reverence for their visible creator: mankind. That’s one of the conflicts on End of Nothing, that some robots came to the planet, having been created by humans, and some were created later by the human-created robots.
Into all of this, one of the human researchers claims to have discovered heaven—the real deal, with golden stairs, ivory towers, and flying angels. A human heaven. And all the conflicts come out into the open."
I really liked Simak's writing style and would read more by this author.
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