Shakespeare's Planet
Author: Clifford D. Simak
Year: 1976
Abstract:
Horton Carter, Ship, and an robot named Nicodemus land on a hospitable looking planet after roughly a thousand years
of travelling through space. But the planet is not what it seemed. They meet an alien named Carnivore, a human skull
from a man who called himself Shakespeare, and a young woman who informs them that it has really been more than
two thousand years since they left Earth and everything is different. Then the pond talks to them and the nature of
the strange place they've landed gets deeper.
| Advanced Mind |  |
| Exploration/Quest | |
| Military/Fighting | |
| Horror | |
| Magic | |
| Advanced Technology | |
| Time Travel/Alternate History | |
| Science | |
| Aliens/Beasties | |
| Contemporality |
Other books in this series:
None
tyranist's Review
Despite the fact that I have several Clifford Simak books in my personal library, this is the first book of his that
I have ever read. It seemed a likely enough choice since I have a passion for Shakespeare. Unfortunately, the book
just doesn't deliver like I hoped. Instead, I finished the book feeling that there just wasn't much point.
I would venture to suggest that it is a science fiction retelling of The Tempest, but I'm not positive. In the
end, it didn't seem to matter much anyway. While I enjoyed some of the characters and thought that the setting had
great potential, I really didn't feel like the book was completely worth the effort. It was a quick read, though, and
maybe that was part of the problem. The largest conflict in the book takes place in under ten pages and is never really
explained. This works on the level that the reader is never given much information throughout the book, but I would
have liked some sort of reward for trying to sort through the little bits that were given. This probably won't appeal
to a lot of people and is probably really hard to find anyway. I wouldn't go out of my way to track it down except, of
course, that I already own a copy.