Book Review: Ancient Shores

Jack McDevitt
1996
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

I picked McDevitt’s Ancient Shores to read on a long flight because I loved his Alex Benedict novels Polaris and Seeker, and I thought any book by him had a good chance of being another fun page-turner.

The idea behind Ancient Shores was great. But its execution wasn’t nearly of the caliber of the other two books. This is one of McDevitt’s earliest full-length novels, and it seems that at the time he wrote it he hadn’t yet fully developed his nice snappy style or learned how to create solid, charismatic characters. It’s a bit sad, because with such a great premise, there’s so much he could have done with it.

The first half of the novel is the better half by far. Suspense and anticipation build naturally and effectively, with a good deal of humor, and it is mostly free from the lack of authenticity, slow plotting, and character stiffness that beset the second half.

The story starts in remote northeastern North Dakota, on a farm right on the Canadian border. Farmer (and amateur pilot) Tom Lasker is working his wheat field and discovers a complete sailboat—a ketch—buried in the ground. With help from neighbors, he digs the whole thing up and puts it in his front yard.

The fact that a fairly large boat was entirely buried in his wheat field is odd enough, in and of itself. Tom and Ginny Lasker have been farming this particular land for decades, neither of them buried it, and neither of them have any idea how anyone else could have done it without either of them noticing. 

What is odder is that the boat looks entirely new. Nothing seems to stick to the sails, or the boat itself. Nothing can damage it. Even sitting out in the weather, it doesn’t get wet or dirty. And there is writing on it where instructions and labels should be, but the writing is in incomprehensible symbols that none of the linguists at any of the nearby universities can identify. And then, one night while Tom is out of town, Ginny notices that the boat has running lights: eerie green glowy lights that go on when it gets dark.

Ginny calls their friend Max (also a pilot) to take a look, because she’s spooked out by the boat lights. Max, in turn, is spooked out by the whole boat. He sends a sample of the sail fabric to be tested at Moorhead State. April Cannon, the chemist who tests it, says that the sail material is nothing she’s ever seen before: an indestructible substance with an atomic number so high it shouldn’t exist—or at least should be highly radioactive (which it is not). 

April is the first person to suspect where the boat is really from. Her hypothesis—as crazy as it sounds—is that the boat isn’t new, but is rather thousands of years old, and that it was buried in the Laskers’ wheat field because it was abandoned there by its previous owners during the last ice age, at a time when North Dakota was at the bottom of a giant prehistoric inland sea called Lake Agassiz.

Max believes her. The two of them hire a ground-radar team to search the surrounding area for other artifacts. And they find a whole building, buried on Sioux reservation land, on what would have been the shore of a deep-water harbor on the eastern shore of Lake Agassiz. The building appears to be a port, and is made out of the same indestructible material as the boat. 

Up to this point, about halfway into the book, the story is relatively fun. The plot unfolds in a slow, steady, and pleasingly homespun way. Pages turn with somewhat gliding speed. But after the discovery of the prehistoric port, the narrative starts to get increasingly scattered and clunky. 

Max and April strike a deal with the Sioux who own the land where the port is. The Sioux let them bring in a troupe of student volunteers to dig it up, and provide a security force to protect it from the various nuts and UFO fans and generally curious people who have started to show up to see it.

Eventually, Max and April’s team finds a way inside the building. There they discover a set of controls that can transport them to a variety of beautiful, spectacular, and occasionally lethal locations around the galaxy. 

Meanwhile, everyone in the wider U.S. population starts to freak out. Scientists and artists and explorers come in droves begging to go through the portal. Deranged people try to destroy it. Local businessmen want to use it to their own financial advantage—as do the local tax collectors.

A large number of individual freak outs are described in inserts and side narratives that are disjointed, disruptive to the main plot line, and not very interesting. The press releases, FBI memos, on-screen field reporters, and official broadcast announcements all sound too conversational and informal, and, to be honest, a little dorky. 

But by far the part of the novel that rings the most hollow is what happens to world economics as a result of the discovery of the boat and port. McDevitt’s take is that when all businesses—from local retailers to global corporations—get wind first of the sail fabric of Tom Lasker’s buried boat, and then the portal to other planets, their reaction is complete and total panic. They are all convinced that they will go out of business when the technologies behind the sail fabric and the transport controls become generally available. 

Markets tank. CEOs lobby politicians aggressively to the point where the otherwise calm, pragmatic, Trumanesque U.S. president becomes convinced that the port must be blown to smithereens. And even the United Nations eventually comes calling, telling the Sioux they have no choice but to give up control of their land to the international body to preserve the economic stability of the entire world. 

Which is all a bit ridiculous. First of all, the president—at least not the theoretically pragmatic one in this book—wouldn’t bomb an Indian reservation, including killing potentially hundreds of innocent U.S. civilians, just because a few textile and transportation companies are worried they’ll go out of business. 

And, more importantly, for every corporation that sees doom and gloom in the event of a major technological breakthrough, I guarantee you there will be twice as many entrepreneurs who see potential for huge profit in it. Yes, major technological advancements have the potential to make some businesses go out of business. But others can prosper immensely. I doubt any sane national leader would  have actively tried to prevent the development of the internal combustion engine, no matter how powerful the horse-and-buggy lobby. 

Anyway, it all culminates in a heroic Standing-Rock-type stand-off at the port site between the Indians and the U.S. Marshalls. McDevitt does inject a little excitement, and almost rescues the ending, by having Max fly Tom Lasker’s antique World-War-II-era fighter plane into the fray. But he ruins the finale with a silly, fawning, deus ex machina stunt in which a small group of eminent real-life astronauts, authors, and scientists come in at the last minute to risk their lives to save the portal.