Book Review – A Heritage of Stars

Author: Clifford D. Simak
Cover Artist: Chris Moore
Publisher: Methuen
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date:1986

If you’re like me, and you picked up a novel with a cover showing a robot head impaled on a spike, you’d be pretty excited. You’d expect there to be a scene of robot head spearing in the book.

So you can imagine my dismay to find that the worst thing that happens to robots in A Heritage of Stars is that they’re hunted for sport, decapitated, and their brain cases built into nifty pyramids by post-apocalyptic barbarians.

Actually, that does sound pretty good, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s the after-effect of my reading How to Survive a Robot Uprising that makes the idea so satisfying. The robots in this novel aren’t scary cylons, they’re more like C3PO.

I’d better point out now, because I know you’d all love a book in which C3PO is hunted for sport, that nothing so exciting happens in the book. The robot-hunting happens off-screen, so to speak. About the only robot we get to see is Rollo, probably the last robot on earth.

He’s pretty cool, though: he hunts grizzly bears to render their fat into oil. When we first meet him he’s trapped under a tree, where he’s discovered by Thomas Cushing.

Cushing was a wanderer through this post-apocalyptic world, before being taken in by a couple from the University: a haven for knowledge in a dark world of barbarian tribes.

One day he improbably discovers a drawer full of untouched notes by the world’s most famous historian telling of the Place of Going to the Stars. These have lain undisturbed in the University library for a thousand years. They can’t have a very disciplined library staff.

He sets off to find this place, on the way meeting the aforementioned Rollo (who never shuts up, and has a bit of an attitude), a witch, a horse, a father and daughter with psychic powers, and various odd creatures in the form of shimmers, shadows, rocks, trees and spheres.

Simak’s book reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s writing, or maybe Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. There’s a folksy feel to them. Something very American. I’d describe the book as pastoral science fiction.

Some people would find the book infuriating on the grounds of it being so civilised a milieu, with more of a feeling of a frontier than a barbaric land. I chose to read the novel as a fantasy or mythic tale.

Civilisation in this novel collapsed because humanity got fed up with its oppressive ‘technological’ society and simply threw it off one day, wantonly destroying the machines and robots that served them. This implausible scenario is part of what led me to read the book as a parable.

Simak often deals with this theme of the need for a simpler, or different way of building a civilisation, without technological excesses (which are only vaguely defined). He doesn’t offer much in the way of a programme in A Heritage of Stars, and seems to end up wanting to have his cake and eat it too, technology-wise.

This is a quite pleasant book, and Simak’s tone is interesting. Ultimately, though, it’s nothing to rush out and buy. Try his City (1952) instead.

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