Poor, Damn, Trusting Fools: A Review of Clifford D. Simak's Destiny Doll.
Read my first Clifford D. Simak (who was the third Grand Master anointed by the Science Fiction Writers of America, after Robert A. Heinlein and Jack Williamson; the SFWA are the folks who hand out the Nebula Awards every year) book a short while ago: Destiny Doll (NY: DAW Books, Inc.; 1971; first DAW Books edition: October 1982 [DAW Book Number 502]; ISBN 0-87997-772-8; 208 pps.; cover art by Frank Kelly Freas).
Destiny Doll is the story of a small party of misfits -- red-headed Sara Foster, a celebrated big game hunter; George Smith, a blind, corpulent and childish old man; a rat-like, self-professed mendicant named Hubert Jackson who goes by the name of Friar Tuck; and Mike Ross, space pilot and planet hunter (and the novel's first person narrator) who was harried back to a rusticating Earth by angry creditors, investors and settlers of the last planet he discovered for human colonization. Sara asks Ross to fly her, Friar Tuck and George on their quest for a legendary spaceman, Lawrence Arlen Knight, called The Wanderer: Knight disappeared many years ago, along with a telepathic robot named Roscoe that he designed, on a quest of his own, and Sara, who has gotten nearly as bored with her Allan Quatermain-like activities as the general public has tired of reading and hearing about them, has hit upon the idea of playing Stanley to Knight's Livingstone to revive her flagging celebrity as well as her own interest in life. Though Ross sneers at the proposal and takes an instant, active dislike to Tuck, since he can't stand the thought of remaining grounded on Earth for the rest of his life, and since Sara tempts him with almost more money than he's lost, he grudgingly accepts.
The four soar off through the far reaches of space, guided by the voice that George hears in his head, and eventually land on an unknown planet with a gleaming white city and miles-high trees. They soon discover that they are unable to leave again, and that the city -- and the planet -- have many, many secrets, most of which they are unable to fathom. Along the way they meet a wizened gnome, several and various intelligent rocking horses (called "hobbies"), Turkic/Mongol-like centaurs, intelligent, belligerent and ballistic ("grenadier" might be more accurate) trees, and the most memorable octopus-faced BEM (bug-eyed monster) this side of Lovecraft. Oh yes, and the small wooden doll of the title.
Destiny Doll starts out promisingly enough, particularly the first paragraph, which could as easily be the opener for a choice noir yarn ("The place was white and there was something aloof and puritanical and uncaring about the whiteness, as if the city stood so lofty in its thoughts that the crawling scum of life was as nothing to it;" p. 5); Mike Ross is a standard brick-cum-rogue, but is given enough of a personality to differentiate him from a thousand other such characters: better still, he's isn't a polymath or a superheroic-level athlete. The characterization of the others is hit or miss, but the writing itself is mostly fine with spots of dry humor salted in for seasoning, and the plot feels like one of Philip José Farmer's more successful ones, with surprisingly intelligent fillips given to what would otherwise be a generic pulp adventure; unfortunately the book goes toes-up in the last thirty pages or so (but particularly in the last chapter: 208 pages, 28 chapters) with a very weak and unbelievable resolution. Not to give away the ending, but I can't help but think that Simak wouldn't have counted on anyone interpreting it as I did -- no bueno.
I've got one or two other Simak books in storage (including Mastadonia) that I'll probably dig out and read in the not too terribly distant future, in the hope that he stuck the ending -- or at least, that he didn't fumble it quite as badly as he did in Destiny Doll. But for that ending, Destiny Doll is better written than some other sci-fi classics I've read (particularly Jack Williamson's The Humanoids...), which goes a long way to explain why many people still regard sci-fi as a substandard, slightly disreputable genre.