A Choice of Gods

Extract: I first fell in love with Clifford Simak while reading his award winning novelette, "The Big Front Yard". Two novels later, I am still enamored with the way he juxtaposes rural America and science fiction. In this novel, Simak's characters are the few remaining humans on earth after a mysterious rapture has taken most people to another planet. Of the remaining few, most have developed instantaneous interstellar thought-travel, and all are nearly immortal. Only Jason and Martha Whitney, a small tribe of Native Americans, and some scattered others are left to a world that has slowly returned to a nearly pre-modern human state, except for the robots. Now after 5000 years, the raptured masses have rediscovered their planet of origin and want to return, threatening the idyllic life of the remaining few, and the Eden-like state to which the Earth has returned...