Special Deliverance

The longer I sit after finishing Special Deliverance the more I dislike it, even hate parts of it. In a lot of way it bares resemblance to Simak's earlier work Destiny Doll: an assembled cast of characters meeting each other for the first time, exploring a strange, mostly empty world between meals over campfires, while the oddities they discover slowly pick them off one at a time. A detached professor from a version of Earth where slot machines are used ubiquitously to fund social safety nets is transported to another realm entirely, where he meets of with 4 other travels from other version of Earth. During their travels to find who or what brought them together and a way to escape, they find among other relics: a deserted city crumbling to dust, a needle-like tower that vibrates in song, a sea of dark chaotic power, and a mysterious blue cube with seemingly no purpose whatsoever.

Unfortunately, Destiny Doll is this books superior in most every way. Special Deliverance is by and large painfully dull. Sure, there are moment of intrigue, but they are interspersed across vast seas of tedium. It follows a formula that Simak is prone to without elevating any of the characters, the narrative, or the world itself beyond what Simak has done in his earlier works.

The biggest sin though is the ending, one that was both far too predictable and pat when the book was published in 1981, but also strangely rushed all into the final 10 pages. Simak, forced into tying up all the loose ends of the narrative within what I can only imagine was a page limit, decided to test the suspension of disbelief of the reader to a degree I have not seen in some time. The ending makes the central characters appear dumb beyond belief (which undermines the entire ending by itself), does not satisfactorily explain the events of the narrative, and worse still it makes those events seem pointless.

Some of these problems present themselves in Destiny Doll, but the higher level of strangeness of the environments distracted me enough to overlook more of the flaws. This ending is also much, much worse. A minor work Simak at best.