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Project Pope

by Clifford D. Simak

Cover artist: Rowena Morrill

Publisher: Ballantine

Pub year: 1982

Cover price: $2.75

 

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Book detail for Project Pope

Cover tagline

Robots, romance and religion combine in the year's most unusual novel

Back cover text

Vatican-17

On the Rim planet fittingly called the End of Everything [sic], a bizarre society of robots and humans toiled for a thousand years to perfect a religion that would create a new and all-embracing faith — no novelty in a galaxy crowded with religions. But one project was hidden from the hordes of pilgrims welcomed at Vatican-17. Trained human sensitives were sending their minds ranging through all of time and space, gathering all the information that could exist. With that information, a computer of infinite knowledge, wisdom and infallibility was being constructed in secret — the ultimate Pope.

But now, the project is being threatened by a young woman journalist on the trail of a sensational story...and, even more incredibly, by one of the searcher sensitives who, while drifting in unsuspected dimensions, claims to have encountered Heaven!

"The return of Simak's favorite themes in a thoughtful, gentle, delightfully original treatment...thoroughly enjoyable."
— Kirkus Reviews

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Interior text

Williamson to Simak: "A Masterpiece!"

"Project Pope strikes me as a real masterpiece, one of the too few books in our field to reach the level of the best general literature. All at once, it's science fiction, fantasy, philosophy, and even religion, warmed through and through with the genius of Cliff himself — tolerance would be the wrong word, because it implies critical reservations Cliff seldom shows. He takes us to a world of good feeling, where evil is remote and we can like nearly everybody — robots and aliens as well as men. He makes it real, if also strange enough, and he's not afraid of large ideas.

"Simak is somehow able to give difficult abstractions a persuasive simplicity, and he tells his story with a craftsmanship I envy — with suspense and surprise and continual ingenuity. The book is at least ninety-seven percent perfect. I think it will win awards, and I want to thank Cliff for writing it."
— Jack Williamson