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A review by weaselweader
Cemetery World by Clifford D. Simak
2.0
A graveyard on planet Earth, destroyed by war 10,000 years ago!
Music is no longer called simply “music”. In a distant future, an artist imbues a radical, specially designed artificial intelligence with his own thoughts and creativity. The computer/robot (styled a “compositor”) then uses that uploaded information together with the sensory inputs that it receives from the environment around it to create a multi-media piece of art/music that is characterized as a “composition”. Fletcher Carson wants to return to earth, humanity’s birthplace, to create a revolutionary piece of art that would reflect the birth and death of the planet together with its current status as graveyard to the galaxy.
Full marks to author Clifford D Simak (long one of my classic sci-fi favourites) for a novel full of provocative ideas – robotic intelligence that is both sentient and fully autonomous, reminiscent of Star Trek’s innovative use of Data in the original series; a futuristic idea for the combination of art and music into “compositions”; the metaphorical use of planet Earth as a graveyard for humanity that perforce emigrated to other planets after they had destroyed their home planet in a senseless war; the use of unthinking programmed machines left behind to carry on a meaningless war long after humanity had evacuated Earth; the notion that sentient artificial intelligence left to its own devices in the long-term might evolve and grow; and more.
Sounds gripping and positively rife with potential, doesn’t it? And you’d think that ideas like that in the hands of a masterful wordsmith like Simak would make CEMETERY WORLD a hands-down winner! Consider this brief poetic segment on the “compositor” hard at work communing with the world around it creating a futuristic masterpiece:
“He is sitting out there soaking it all up … He is weaving a woodland fantasy out of the dark shapes of the trees, the sound of nighttime wind in leaves, the chuckle of the water, the glitter of the stars and three black shapes huddled at a camfire. A campfire canvas, a nocturne, a poem, perhaps a delicate piece of sculpture – he’s putting it all together.”
Sadly, CEMETERY WORLD fails pretty miserably. The plot-line and the character development never really rise much above the weakest B-grade spaghetti westerns. The hero and his love interest remain well below the threshold of credible and the villains are little more than hokey hillbillies. Indeed, the stillborn possibilities inherent in those ideas were the only reason I decided on a 2-star rating as opposed to 1-star or perhaps even a DNF. If you’ve never read Simak’s work before then, for goodness’ sake, do NOT start here. It’d be a sure bet that you’d never pick up other classics of the genre such as WAY STATION, TIME AND AGAIN or CITY.
Paul Weiss
Music is no longer called simply “music”. In a distant future, an artist imbues a radical, specially designed artificial intelligence with his own thoughts and creativity. The computer/robot (styled a “compositor”) then uses that uploaded information together with the sensory inputs that it receives from the environment around it to create a multi-media piece of art/music that is characterized as a “composition”. Fletcher Carson wants to return to earth, humanity’s birthplace, to create a revolutionary piece of art that would reflect the birth and death of the planet together with its current status as graveyard to the galaxy.
Full marks to author Clifford D Simak (long one of my classic sci-fi favourites) for a novel full of provocative ideas – robotic intelligence that is both sentient and fully autonomous, reminiscent of Star Trek’s innovative use of Data in the original series; a futuristic idea for the combination of art and music into “compositions”; the metaphorical use of planet Earth as a graveyard for humanity that perforce emigrated to other planets after they had destroyed their home planet in a senseless war; the use of unthinking programmed machines left behind to carry on a meaningless war long after humanity had evacuated Earth; the notion that sentient artificial intelligence left to its own devices in the long-term might evolve and grow; and more.
Sounds gripping and positively rife with potential, doesn’t it? And you’d think that ideas like that in the hands of a masterful wordsmith like Simak would make CEMETERY WORLD a hands-down winner! Consider this brief poetic segment on the “compositor” hard at work communing with the world around it creating a futuristic masterpiece:
“He is sitting out there soaking it all up … He is weaving a woodland fantasy out of the dark shapes of the trees, the sound of nighttime wind in leaves, the chuckle of the water, the glitter of the stars and three black shapes huddled at a camfire. A campfire canvas, a nocturne, a poem, perhaps a delicate piece of sculpture – he’s putting it all together.”
Sadly, CEMETERY WORLD fails pretty miserably. The plot-line and the character development never really rise much above the weakest B-grade spaghetti westerns. The hero and his love interest remain well below the threshold of credible and the villains are little more than hokey hillbillies. Indeed, the stillborn possibilities inherent in those ideas were the only reason I decided on a 2-star rating as opposed to 1-star or perhaps even a DNF. If you’ve never read Simak’s work before then, for goodness’ sake, do NOT start here. It’d be a sure bet that you’d never pick up other classics of the genre such as WAY STATION, TIME AND AGAIN or CITY.
Paul Weiss