Epilogue

WORKING

Anderson, Poul. "Epilogue." Analog Science Fact/Science Fiction March 1962. Collected Time and Stars. New York: Doubleday, 1964.[1] Going for Infinity. New York: TOR/SF Book Club, 1990 (?), 2002.[2]

"In Poul Anderson’s 'Epilogue' (1962), a space expedition inadvertently returns to Earth three billion years late and faces something [... quite] alien. Beneath a bloated and glaring sun, the astronauts find their homeworld bare of organic life but teeming with a complex ecology of 'plant' and 'animal' forms evolved from self-replicating machines. New intelligence has arisen from that evolution, but humans are beyond its comprehension and hostilities break out." — John J. Pierce, "Imagination and Evolution," unpublished ms. Brief Wikipedia entry has Earth "taken over by a kind of transistor-based ecology of machines; a lack of understanding between the robots and the humans leads to tragedy."[3]

RDE, Initial Compiler 16Ap18