Somewhat boilerplate Simak but with a few refreshing innovations
The story takes place in an unspecified future, after interstellar travel and colonization of other planets has become commonplace. Captain Michael Ross, the narrator, is a spaceship pilot and opportunistic entrepreneur. While stopping over on Earth (though he wasn’t born there), he is approached by some clients who want to hire him to pilot them on a voyage to other worlds. Sara Foster is a big-game huntress who seeks adventure, Friar Tuck (yep, that’s his name) is a brother of some unspecified religious order, and George Smith is a blind man. George has been hearing voices that he believes are interstellar transmissions from a long-lost legendary Earth adventurer who is rumored to have found a paradise among the stars. By following George’s mysterious sixth sense, the travelers are led to a distant unknown planet that appears to be the abandoned home of an advanced civilization, its skyscraping edifices having remained pristinely intact but apparently uninhabited.
I wasn’t too impressed with the first half of Destiny Doll, quite frankly. The things seen and heard on the mysterious planet are a bit too weird for weird’s sake. Early on, for example, the travelers are met by a race of intelligent porcelain hobby horses with rocking-chair feet. Why would such beings exist? It is hinted later that they must have been created by human visitors who would have had memories of such an Earth toy, but no further explanation is given. The world Simak presents here is full of such fanciful details. Though set in a distant future on a distant world, this isn’t hard science fiction but rather just as much fantasy as sci-fi.
Destiny Doll soon settles into a familiar pattern of Simak’s fiction. The human heroes set off with a few robots and/or aliens on a cross-country quest through a harsh landscape (see also A Heritage of Stars, Shakespeare’s Planet, Special Deliverance, Enchanted Pilgrimage, The Fellowship of the Talisman, Where the Evil Dwells). The landscape is largely deserted, just the way Simak likes it, which requires the party to rough it in the wilderness. In Simak’s books, the campfire is the ultimate bonding experience between characters, and this story includes an ample supply of campfires. Simak is sometimes called science fiction’s preeminent pastoralist because of the attention he pays to nature and rural life. Even on distant worlds, he still explores man’s relationship to nature. The second half of Destiny Doll steadily improves as Simak delves deeper into his philosophical conjectures about the destiny of humankind, multiple realities, and alien intelligences. Though it may read a bit like a goofy children’s book at first, Destiny Doll eventually delivers the kind of deep, sensitive thinking one expects from Simak.
One thing that makes this novel more interesting than some of Simak’s other quest narratives is its protagonist. The heroes of Simak’s books are often mild-mannered average joes who rise to the occasion when necessary and face their fears in the end. Mike Ross, however, is atypically more of a macho action hero in the Han Solo mold (pre-Star Wars, though). Destiny Doll is not one of Simak’s best novels, but it’s a good solid piece of work that fans of his will find sufficiently thought-provoking and entertaining.
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