Who isn t a sucker for a good robot story? Few sci-fi fans can resist such a staple of the genre, especially when it s done well, and the first section of Tony Daniel s three-part Earthling stands shoulder to shoulder with the best. Daniel is an able and imaginative writer, and his gentle, curious mining robot Orf is a bona fide charmer. Reactivated for a deep-digging geological research project, Orf is imbued with the memories of a dead geologist and acclimatizes himself to the world like a wide-eyed, articulate child, observing mating moths with the same detached fascination as he does a cold-blooded murder.

Although the poetry-loving Orf is the novel s common thread, he ceases to be its focus after the first section. That part closes when Orf discovers sentient beings ("terranes") in the Earth s mantle, and cataclysmic earthquakes and flooding destroy the northwestern U.S., plunging the world into chaos. As exciting as all that may sound, these portentous events signal only the unraveling of Earthling s patchwork narrative. The disappointing middle section follows the harrowing--and gory--journey of a Park Service ranger (the Park Service being just another warring, post-apocalyptic tribe) delivering medical supplies to California. Earthling s third and final section nearly--but not quite--salvages the novel, fast-forwarding to the year 3000, where society "trances" across the galaxy and studies the Earth not as an organism but as a piece of art.