Special Deliverance

A college professor & other oddballs are dropped onto a bleak world near a giant blue cube with no clue how to proceed. Intelligence, loyalty & friendship, the existence of god & souls, the unexpected benefits & harm of invention, tools as extensions of humanity & more questions are often explored by Simak's robots, used as surrogate humans. His robots begin as likable mechanical persons, but morph in surprising ways. Having achieved intelligence, robots move onto common themes such as, "Why are we here?" & "Do robots have souls"? Examples are the faithful butler Jenkins in City, the religious robot Hezekiel in A Choice of Gods, the frontier robots in Special Deliverance & A Heritage of Stars, & the monkish robots seeking heaven in Project Pope. Simak throws in many sf fillips that remain unexplained. His characters encounter alien creatures & concepts they simply cannot understand & never will. For example, in Special Deliverance, the humans are stalked by The Wailer, which turns out to be a huge wolf-like creature that bells an infinitely-sad howl. They never learn what the creature is, why it seems sad or how it got there. Simak leaves mysteries hanging in his writing.