Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 00:43:51 -0500 (EST)
From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Expedition to Earth?
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

Ernest Lilley wrote:

> In it, explorers return to Earth after some millennia and find it
> inhabited by robots which have evolved to about the level of well,
> Moonwatcher in 2001.

If "some millennia" might mean several billion years, you are probably
thinking of "Epilogue" by Poul Anderson.  According to ISFDB, this
story can be found in:

Analog, March 1962
Time and Stars (1964), Poul Anderson
The Ends of Time (1970), Robert Silverberg
Tales of the Flying Mountains (1970), Poul Anderson
The Many Worlds of Poul Anderson (1974)
Explorations (1981), Poul Anderson
Analog Anthology #5: Writers' Choice (1983), Stanley Schmidt

> If anyone has a copy handy and can come up with the sentence early
> on where the landscape is too weird for the explorers to understand,
> I'd appreciate it.

  But what is a thick shaft of gray metal, planted in the sand, central
  to a labyrinthine skeleton of straight and curved girders, between
  which run still more enigmatic structures embodying helices and
  toruses and Möbius strips and less familiar geometrical elements,
  the entire thing some fifty feet tall; flaunting at the top several
  hundred thin metal plates whose black sides are turned toward the sun?

This sentence is actually eleven pages in.  The previous text is
mostly from the perspective of the natives (robots).

Now I'm going to have to go re-read the whole thing.

Happy Ayn Rand centennial.