Jack McDevitt
2005
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –
This
book is great in many ways. It is an exciting detective story with
appealing central characters, plenty of outer-space travel, and a
satisfying ending.
The story takes place many centuries in the
future, after humans have developed faster-than-light travel and
colonized several worlds. It is narrated by Chase Kolpath, an
interstellar pilot. Kolpath and her boss, Alex Benedict, make up the
staff of Rainbow Enterprises, a company that explores remote sections of
space, finds ancient artifacts from abandoned space stations and failed
colonies, and sells the artifacts to collectors.
It is
lucrative. But Kolpath and Benedict are always running afoul of academic
archaeologists and historians who view their business as theft, and this
tension pervades the entire book.
The book’s adventure begins when a woman asks Rainbow Enterprises to appraise an antique cup with the seal of the starship Seeker on it. The cup turns out to be 9,000 years old and to be, just possibly, a relic of an ancient lost colony.
In
researching the cup, Kolpath and Benedict find out that back in the 25th
century, Earth was poor, overpopulated, plague-stricken, and ruled by a
series of harsh authoritarian regimes. A small group of idealists, the
Margolians, fled Earth in two rickety starships, one of which was named Seeker.
They may have successfully established a new Eden for themselves or they may have died
in the attempt, but, either way, they were never heard from again.
Their fate at first
became the subject of novels and films but gradually their memory faded
to the point where most people in Kolpath & Benedict’s time now
think they are merely a legend and never existed at all.
If the cup can be proven to be from
this lost colony, and if it can be used to trace the colony’s location,
it could be Rainbow Enterprises’ greatest find ever.
Together, Benedict and
Kolpath unravel the secrets of the ancient emigrants. They do library
research; they talk to avatars of the long-lost Margolians; they explore
remote sections of outer space; they have daring adventures and evade
several attempts on their life.
This was the first time I had read anything by Jack McDevitt. I liked it so much I immediately read the prequel, Polaris, which was just as good and which suffered not at all from being read out of order.
Stephen
King has called McDevitt “the logical heir to Isaac Asimov and Arthur
C. Clarke.” That is a pretty high bar, but King may just be right.
McDevitt’s writing is straightforward and the process of putting
together the pieces of the puzzle keeps your attention the whole time.
One of the things I liked best about this book (and about Polaris,
too) was Chase Kolpath. She is matter-of-fact and thrives under
pressure. People naturally call her by her last name. She is a great
pilot and her boss respects her as such. Benedict is a better sleuth,
but when his investigations repeatedly put their lives in immediate physical
danger, she’s always the one who keeps her head clear and gets them out
of it. She has a private life and keeps it private, from both her boss
and largely from the reader, too. She likes a party and goes out with
guys but doesn’t get attached to any one of them.
As a side project, Kolpath decides to watch all the films based on the
Margolian legend. Her summaries of the plots of the movies she watches
are really quite funny.
I also liked
the ways that McDevitt layers fiction within fiction. He puts a quote at
the beginning of each of his chapters, for example; sometimes it is
from a real (19th-20th century) author, but more often it is from fake
fiction or fake philosophy, written sometime during the 21st-26th
centuries. Even the fake quotes don’t feel like the rest of McDevitt’s writing, so
it really does feel like he is borrowing from other authors.
An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Cheeze Blog.
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