Infinity Beach by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WARTY!

Though humanity has expanded from Earth to nine settled worlds, they're alone in the universe - but when Dr Kimberly Brandywine investigates a missing expedition, she makes a shocking discovery. "McDevitt is the logical heir..." Given Stephen King's twisted logic, I don't doubt he believes this; i doubt only that it's true. My reviews of McDevitt's books can be found in this blog. Most of them are not good.

Cauldron by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WARTY!

This is where I quit reading this series. At the time I didn't know I would be quitting it, but I sure wasn't anywhere near invested enough to actively seek the next one. In the end I read a prequel in which I was seriously disappointed. As is usual in this series, McDevitt spends way too much time on things which really don't drive the story. In this case it's ironically the new drive (which will power McDevitt's other series in this universe, but which is set a couple of centuries later, I believe).

Finally McDevitt gets serious about the biggest threat to the galaxy, which was discovered in the first book in this series, but then inexplicably neglected until this story, five novels later! It turns out that the omega 'clouds' are coming from near the center of the galaxy, and inexplicably after being rather retired from spaceflight, Hutch pilots this next trip to seek out the source, which turns out to be rather boring. Nothing much happens - it's all journey and little payoff, and I think this boredom is why I lost interest in the series - that, and the fact that with this discovery, it was largely over by then anyway.

Odyssey by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WARTY!

Priscilla Hutchins isn't even a pilot in this one - she's an administrator and the book focuses on a different pilot whose main qualification, it seems, is that she's 'beautiful'. Interest in space travel is waning (despite a deadly omega cloud with Earth's name on it?!) and so Hutch is fighting that, and a mission is launched to try and figure out what these 'UFOs' are that are being spotted out in space. They're named moonriders for no good reason, but why is the novel called Odyssey? In Omega, the clouds are called Omega clouds, so the novel is called Omega. Not here I guess. Anyway, this new pilot drops monitors to discover what these moonriders are, yet they apparently can't drop monitors to watch the omega clouds, one of which is barreling down on Earth?!!)

The story made little sense and is perhaps the most boring of the series that I read.

Omega by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WARTY!

This is the fourth novel in the Priscilla Hutchins series and like the previous one, it has nothing to do with the omega cloud threat per se, even though it is a threat from one of those 'clouds' which starts the story off.

Given that this threat was discovered in the first book in the series, you would think by now that humanity would have monitors on every known omega cloud out there, tracking it, but once again they're taken by surprise as an omega threatens a planet with a civilization on it. In true Star Trek mode (barf! I am not a fan of Star Trek), they've somehow convinced themselves that they must save the planet without revealing themselves to the aliens. This makes zero sense.

The idea in Star Trek is that civilizations must inevitably suffer after contact with a superior civilization, but this is bullshit based on a primitive and ignorant past. It makes no sense in an enlightened future (and Star Trek breaches the rule constantly!). It especially makes no sense here when an entire plant is threatened. Rather than try to tackle the Omega cloud, the focus inexplicably is on the planet and of course they end up making contact.

One again we have minor and uninteresting characters and a planetary threat - pretty much the same as in previous volumes, which is why I detest series for the most part - it's inevitably the same story over and over again with the same characters and that's precisely what happens here; same threat, same urgency. These novels could each have been written independently with new characters instead of being part of the same series and nothing would have been lost while there stood much to gain. Of course, then the cloning of the earlier volumes for re-use in later ones would have been far more stark. I guess maybe that's why it's a series? The more I reconsider these though, the more I wonder why I stayed with this series as long as I did. I must have viewed them differently when I was younger than I do now! Clearly my tastes and tolerance have changed!

Chindi by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WARTY!

The "Chindi" in the story is an asteroid that's been converted into a space ship to capture samples from across the galaxy. The story of Chindi is another example of McDevitt tossing a bunch of spoiled, uninteresting, flat and minor characters into a spaceship piloted by Priscilla Hutchins, the least commanding commander ever, and having them do stupid things repeatedly despite life-threatening scenarios on repeat. These "rich, amateur SETI enthusiasts" hire her to pilot them on a jaunt to try and track down where a mysterious signal is coming from, and their journey takes them on a sort of hare and hounds trip from one planet to another, each of which is orbited by an alien satellite. Why Hutch would go off on yet another trip populated by idiots is a mystery, and I forget what happened here. Maybe she lost her job or got fired or something, and was desperate for the gig?

Given that one of these secret satellites is around Earth, it's very strange that this group and Hutch are the only ones who are pursuing the signal, but here it is. Improbable is what McDevitt does, but he's well-off and old now so I guess she doesn't much care how he got there. The idiots abroad encounter evidence of a snake society which destroyed itself in nuclear war. How snakes would ever get that far is a mystery, but this is how McDevitt creates his aliens: they're just like Earth creatures with no consideration given to how or why. After snake world, they encounter beautiful aliens who fool the visitors into falling in love with them only to prove to be murderous and who take two victims from the passengers.

Finally they encounter the asteroid and discover it's a space-going zoo, so really, Star Trek 'The Menagerie'. It's been so long that I read this and I barely remember it, so I guess it really didn't leave much of an impression, but it certainly didn't turn me off the series otherwise I would never have moved on to the next one, which I did. Reflecting on it now though, several years later, I feel less benign toward it!

Deepsix by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the immediate sequel to McDevitt's The Engines of God. Unlike that novel, which I read some time ago and then recently revisited via an audiobook, this one I read some time ago and haven't thought much about it since, so my recollection of it has dwindled somewhat and I had to refresh it a bit for this review. I do recall the basic story - just not a lot of the details.

It's set in 2204, and on the negative side, the second book in this series suffers from everything I despise about a series: that the subsequent volumes are really a warmed-over redux of the first volume, which is only a prologue to begin with. In this particular case, there's too much of the first book being repeated here, evidently in the hope that readers won't notice it's the same dinner with a different dressing: doomed planet (it was a moon in the last book) with people trapped on it (same), who do dumb things (same) such as wasting time on a formal burial on a planet that's going to be destroyed anyway, and finally, archaeology with a dramatic deadline looming.

That complaint aired, there was enough in here for me, having read the first volume, to continue with this series. I never did go back to re-read any of this series (apart from the aforementioned audiobook), so maybe that should tell you something! But here a rogue gas giant is threatening a planet with destruction and Priscilla Hutchins is once again the one who's on the spot. She takes a bewildering array of unimportant (to the story) characters there to study the wildlife and flora and also the remnants of a previous civilization. These minor characters get far too much airtime, and she really becomes a minor character in her own story. On top of that, the book is too long, but evidently I found it entertaining enough on my first read through to pursue this series into the next volume.

The Engines of God by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the first in a series called "The Academy" - a series title that could have been a lot better! Why would anyone be excited by that title?! I'm not a fan of series, but I found this one, written in the mid-nineties, palatable when I read it some time ago in a print version. The rest of the series was written between 2000 and 2007, with one more novel coming out in 2018. The last one I read was Starhawk which was a prequel and which I did not like, so I haven't read the 2018 release. I recently listened to this first volume again as an audiobook and found it less thrilling than I originally had, but still a worthy read on balance. It has issues, but overall, I think if you like hard sci-fi this might be to your taste. There are times when it plods and the characters are a bit flat. They sometimes act stupidly, but after the last four years this should surprise no one.

I wasn't a huge fan of the reader of this audio book, which was Tom Weiner. He wasn’t a disaster, but his voice sounded a bit too hard-bitten for my taste. He'd be better of reading a noire private dick novel if you ask me - and one which I wouldn't have any interest in hearing! Given that the main character is female, I felt a female voice was required here, but that wasn't a story-killer.

The story is of a woman named Priscilla Hutchins, who of course predictably goes by 'Hutch' and who is a pilot for the Academy, an organization that fosters archaeological expeditions not on Earth, but on alien worlds where life once existed, but now no longer does. This is why this series appealed to me to begin with, because it’s different for your usual let’s kill evil aliens or evil space humans and which typically makes sci-fi stories so predictably tedious.

The story is slow-moving, and the pilot and the archaeologists she transports to several worlds do stupid things and get themselves into improbable scrapes, but the underlying story isn’t too bad, and it offers a mystery which threads through the series and is eventually resolved without making this volume feel like a prologue or a cliffhanger, and I appreciated that. Each story is self-contained while advancing the mystery through the sequence, although not all volumes address the mystery.

The underlying premise is that there was, perhaps several thousand years before, a race of advanced aliens of whom there is now no trace save for the monuments they left behind them: strange and often confusing monuments. One is a statue of an alien. This is where the story begins, and the archaeologists don't know if this is the people themselves - who have come to be known as the Monument Makers - or if it’s a representation of one of their gods or mythological figures. Other monuments they leave behind consist of very angular geometric shapes and which often seem to have been severely damaged by warfare or by some natural catastrophe. Some monuments look like cities from a distance, but close up are just solid 3D shapes with many right angles. Just enough to make them look unnatural. The story is one of the slow-dawning of knowledge among the archaeologists, as to what all of this actually means.

There are some problems with the story - of the nature of Star Trek-like stupidity or lack of inventiveness and foresight. Despite drones actually being in use since the mid-1960s and especially of late, and despite robots being in use since the mid-1950s, neither Star Trek nor this novel acknowledge that there are any such devices in use anywhere in the universe! Consequently we have these archaeologists and this pilot romping into unknown situations with no support or backup and every trip they make seems to have serious problems befall it.

There's clearly been no attempt whatsoever by this so called 'Academy' to send drones or robots to map newly-discovered worlds before humans go there to study them. It seems like their approach is to simply fly there on spec, using their FTL technology and then eyeball the place until they find something interesting to go down and look at close-up. In that regard, the writing is a bit primitive and amateur. It is from the mid-nineties, but I don't see that this is an excuse for equipping these people with pretty much the same technology and mindset we have today (minus the robots and drones!).

The premise at the start of this story makes little sense. The archaeologists are working on this one find, which is semi-submerged in the ocean. They've had almost three decades on this planet to dig and evidently they still haven't excavated this particular site. There's no word on why. There's a terra-forming corporation waiting to start making over this planet so humans can live there despite there being at least one other planet where humans could live without terraforming (more on that later). The thing is that the terraforming involves multiple nuclear weapons being detonated at the poles in order to melt the ice which somehow they figure will fix the biting-cold temperatures. To me that made no sense. The planet would be irradiated and unlivable, and if this project is looking like it will take a century to complete, as they say, it will have frozen over again before they can move there! Nuclear weapons? Maybe McDevitt's military past was overriding his common sense.

It’s been known since Eunice Foote demonstrated it in 1856, that carbon dioxide traps heat. A study in 1938 showed the greenhouse effect on Earth's atmosphere, and we’ve known Venus was such a runaway greenhouse planet since the late fifties and early sixties. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was founded in 1988, so it’s not like this idea of a greenhouse effect was unknown when McDevitt wrote his novel, yet he wants to use nuclear weapons instead of seeding the atmosphere with some CO₂?

But here’s the thing: we're told that it’s going to be a century before the planet is livable anyway, so what difference does it make if the archaeologists take another day or two, to finish their dig? It doesn’t. Yet the corporation seems obsessed with a deadline, and in order to scare the scientists off, they let one of their comet snowballs fall early into the ocean, which ends up causing a tidal wave, and costs the life of one of the archaeologists.

In order to get even with them, Hutch the hero decides to send them a snowball, but this one is fake, made up of this expanding foam they use to package the artifacts they find. The problem with this is that even though it's low mass, it’s coming at their space station at over 4,000 mph, which means it would do some serious damage and Hutch ought to know this, but she claims it won't do more than bend a panel here or there. It ought to have got her fired, but no legal penalties come of either of these dangerous actions. Given the political scene of late I geuss this isn't so far-fetched after all.

The other problem I had with this scene is that they're planning on nuking this planet and there's no outcry or complaint anywhere about the indigenous life, some of which seems to be quite intelligent if rather apelike. That was shocking - that an author would write this - even in 1994, and not have any consideration for the ecology of the planet that they were destroying. It felt inauthentic. The other side of this coin is a planet they land on where the indigenous life ought to have been wiped out in my opinion, because it was too improbable or dangerous to live anyway, but no-one thinks of this then.

This is the planet I mentioned earlier which could support human life. These team goes down to explore it on foot without any weapons and with zero foreknowledge of local fauna. Nothing happens at all until they’ve been down there for a while and then suddenly there are literally hundreds and hundreds of crabs which have an appendage they can use to slice open their prey. The problem is not the existence of the crabs per se, it's the existence of endless hordes of them in one place and the fact that they're ravenous predators.

Nothing like this could realistically evolve and this is a problem writers frequently make - they know nothing about evolution and invent these threatening creatures which couldn't exist in reality or in isolation from their ecosystem. Anything as ravenous and endlessly predatory as these crabs would have quickly eaten their entire world's food supply. They would then have turned on each other and eaten themselves into extinction. It’s simply not possible to have such a deadly predator in such numbers.

The third improbable crisis is in their finding a possible solution to their question as to what was inflicting the damage on these artificial constructs they'd found - the ones left by the Monument Makers. They have a chance to study this but instead of staying far from it, they land on the very moon this thing is going to destroy and almost get killed. They're afraid to take off because they’re in a very boxy shuttle which they fear will attract something that appears to target angular constructs. It makes no sense. First it makes no sense that the shuttle would be so boxy, second it makes no sense that they would try to get so close to the thing, and thirdly it makes no sense that the thing would come after their angular shuttle when they'd visited a world earlier where a space station had not been attacked by this thing despite it being quite visibly artificial.

So yeah, there are problems with this story, but overall I felt it wasn't too bad of a tale and I commend it as a worthy read. That said, I have to add that I don't feel any urge to keep pursuing a re-read of this whole series. Maybe in future I may take it up in audiobook form if Chirp offers another volume at a discount, but right now I'm not moved to do it, having already been through it once!

Time Travelers Never Die by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WARTY!

I used to be a big fan of McDevitt, but lately I haven't liked his new material. Maybe if I went back and re-read some of his older stuff, such as the Academy Series or the Alex Benedict stories, which I loved, I might not like them so well any more, but the last book of his that I read was not entertaining at all. When I saw this audiobook come up on special offer, I jumped at the chance to read something else of his, but I was disappointed in it, too.

Paul Boehmer's narration did not help one bit. I don't know what he was trying to do, but he was making everything seem so dramatic that nothing actually was dramatic, and he put weird inflections on things. He also doesn't seem to realize that coupon does not have the letter 'U' as the second letter, so it's really pronounced coo-pon, Kew-pon. Seriously. That was annoying because it was used often. More on this anon (can I just abbreviate that to moron?!).

Even had I read this as a print or ebook though, I think I would have lost interest in it, because the main protagonist is so profoundly stupid, and events are so predictable that I could barely stand to listen to portions of it. It sounded slow, forced, and pedantic. One of the problems is that McDevitt writes this novel, set in contemporary times (it was published in 2009 based on a novella from 1997), as though no one has ever heard of time travel - not even in fiction.

The main character is Adrian Shelborne, who absurdly goes by "Shel." His father, Michael, has disappeared from a locked house, and no one can figure it out. How they figure he disappeared from the locked house as opposed to just having gone out and locked the door behind him was somehow lost on me. Maybe I missed it because I listen to this while driving and when I need to completely focus on the road, maybe i miss bits, but anyway it's this big mystery.

Adrian's dad has left behind three electronic devices which he inexplcably refers to as 'coupons'. It's like a little Chromebook from what I gathered, and you open it up and set times, dates, and locations, and it whisks you away to whatever you set. There's also a return button, but Adrian is too stupid to figure that button out. His first trip takes him to rural Pennsylvania, which isn't far from his home, but his time-travel visit takes him to the next day and he has no phone or wallet with him. He does this without thinking about what he's doing, like he's booking a trip online. Instead of trying out the return button, he borrows a phone and calls a friend to come pick him up.

When they arrive back at his house later at night, he thinks he sees someone in an upstairs window, but rather than come in with him and check out the house, his friend leaves him there alone and he doesn't even check out the house himself! It was obvious to me that he had seen himself, and this is confirmed later. This is after he spends a totally stupid day at work, not once realizing that he's time-traveled and this explains everything he encounters at work. This man is profoundly stupid. The next thing he does is take a trip back to witness himself and his friend arriving home, thereby confirming my suspicion that he saw his own face in the window.

This read far more like a badly-written middle-grade book than ever it did a grown-up work, and I couldn't stand to listen to any more of it. I can't commend writing like this, and after many wonderful years together, I guess I'm finally realizing that it's time for me and Jack to part ways. I wish him all the best.

Starhawk by Jack McDevitt

Title: Starhawk
Author: Jack McDevitt
Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WARTY!

I'm a huge fan of Jack McDevitt. For me he's the best space-travel sci-fi author out there. He has two series (as well as many stand-alones and a plethora of short stories), both of which are set in the same universe, but centuries apart. The earlier one is the Priscilla Hutchins series, the later one is the Alex Benedict series. When I read the last of the Hutchins series prior to this, I thought it was over because he had aged Hutchins, and pretty much retired her from piloting, so imagine the thrill I got when I saw this one on the library shelf! What he's done is written a prequel, taking us back to before Hutchins became a respected and seasoned space pilot - to the point where she was training to be one. This is a good move but it’s hard to see this going anywhere else because he's pretty much Ourobourosed himself now!

This novel starts with a false emergency on board the Copperhead, her small training ship, captained by Jake Loomis. It quickly moves on to a real emergency: a cargo ship that has been roped into a passenger transport role taking a dozen or so school girls from the Middle East on a space trip as a reward for their performance in a science contest. Unfortunately, an anti-terraforming group placed a bomb on the ship, designed to take out the engines. They did not expect there to be any extraneous passengers since this is a cargo ship, and no one was supposed to get hurt. Now it’s damaged and needs to have the passengers taken off since it's in a decaying orbit.

The Copperhead is the closest ship, but its capacity is too small to sustain that many people for any great length of time. The cargo ship could sustain them, but its orbit is decaying too fast, so they have to secure the passengers and hang in there until a larger ship can reach them. The Copperhead can safe-harbor the passengers until the other ship gets there - if it gets there soon enough - but there is a shortfall in supply and demand, and the pilot of the cargo ship ends up killing himself in order to spare enough oxygen to sustain the rest of them long enough for the other ship to come in and complete the rescue.

I have several problems with this. The first is that the problem with the cargo ship isn't that it is unlivable, but that it’s in a decaying orbit, so no one can stay aboard until help arrives. My problem with this is that never once is it considered a possibility that they could use the Copperhead to boost the orbit of the cargo craft. This is done all the time with the International Space Station by visiting transport craft, so I don’t get what the problem was here. This is just bad writing. It would have been easy enough to simply have had someone raise that possibility and then for it to be dismissed for reason 'X'.

The second issue was the dwindling oxygen. McDevitt writes it like the ship has a fixed supply and once that's gone, you're screwed, but this is bullshit! Several hundred years into the future, and they don’t have the same CO2 recycling that we already have today in spacecraft today? So this rescue was a great start to the story, but it lacks all credibility if you look at it too closely. The offshoot of this is that Hutchins gets her pilot's license and Loomis, who has serious survivor guilt, retires. It turns out that the bomber, a guy called Leon, is an old friend of his - someone both he and Hutchins had spoken to not that long before. The bomber tracks down Loomis at his remote Virginia cabin and apologizes to him, but Loomis fails to call it in. That's two big strikes against him now. I have a feeling he's being set up to do something brave and fatal later in the story.

The smaller oxygen issue is that no effort seems to be made to conserve what they have. Everyone could have lain down and relaxed (as much as was humanly possible in the circumstances), and they could also have explored the possibility of bringing air over from the crippled cargo ship until that ship dropped too low in its orbit, but this wasn't even considered. Again it’s bad writing. This possibility could have at least been raised if only to then be dismissed in some way, but to not even bring it up doesn’t speak well of an author, because you know readers are going to ask "Why not?" so you might as well deal with it up front. Fortunately, McDevitt writes such good stories overall that I'm willing to forgive him for his trespasses against solid writing on most cases.

Hutchins goes down to Earth to visit her mom, but she gets called in by Kosmik, the space transportation corporation to which she applied for a piloting job. They hired her, but now they need her to start early because something came up. The story continues from there.

I have to say that this is without doubt the weakest novel Jack McDevitt has ever written. It had the potential to be great, but it ended-up being a sad and amateurish story that went nowhere, had no plot, and was one in which even the main character, Priscilla Hutchins ("Hutch"), was boring, which is a travesty. It’s billed on the cover as "a Priscilla Hutchins novel" but it’s as much about Jake Loomis, her mentor, as it is about her. I can’t remember the last novel I read where the star of the series was forced to take a back-seat to another character!

Jake is offered up as the experienced master adventurer, and she's relegated to being the little lady exploring her juvenile "love" interest, and conducting space station tours like she's a teenage volunteer. It’s pathetic. Way to trash your main character, Jack! While Captain Jake is off investigating the most interesting thing - the rogue planet - Hutch is relegated to chauffeuring a politician who originally wanted to cut-back the space program, but who has now changed his mind.

The story isn't at all like McDevitt's other adventures in this series, where there's action, big discoveries, adventure, fun and new things to learn. It’s more like a dear diary of trivia, a kind of 'what I did during the summer holidays' essay where all you did was hang around home, sunbathe, and watch TV. There's a rogue planet, but instead of this being the centerpiece of the novel, it's tacked on at the end almost as though McDevitt realized he had blown this story, and was now desperately forcing this on the ass-end, to try and get some attention when it wiggles.

One of Hutch's biggest problems (other than being trivialized, that is) is her relationship with Cal, an actor who apparently falls into insta-love with her, and she finds nothing wrong with this. She encourages and entertains him, even though she doesn’t feel the same way, and even though his entire attraction to her is painfully and obviously based solely on his perception that she's "beautiful". He never has a word to say about her skills and abilities, her career choices, her mind, her smarts, her decency, the kind of person she is. All he can ever say about her relates directly back to him: how beautiful he thinks she is, and how much he misses her. It's sick and pathetic. The fact that she finds nothing wrong with this at all reeks of bullshit, and makes me think only of how dumb and blind she is. It's written like a young adult novel and frankly, if I'd read this one first, before any of his others in this series, I never would have gone on to read the series.

One odd and striking thing is the conversations which Hutch and Cal have. It’s not just theirs, but it is the most noticeable to me when they converse. When you're talking with someone, you don’t normally say their name every time it’s your turn to speak, but that's pretty much what we tend to get with conversations here, and it’s particularly noticeable between Hutch and Cal. It just feels really false. I don't think McDevitt knows how to write romance.

Another odd thing is McDevitt's addiction to depicting, in tedious detail, everything that these people do during their trips through what he calls "Barber space". This is the 'transition dimension' between the start and end of an interstellar jump. This Barber space trip can take a month or more and is a proportional function of how many light years away the destination is. There's no explanation offered as to why this is so.

Inside Barber space it looks like the spacecraft is enveloped in fog, and not moving - or hardly moving. Ships have been lost in this space, but other than that, it’s travel time, where (subjective) days and nights pass, and people have to find things to do - like watching movies, or reading, or playing games - to pass the time. The problem is that McDevitt seems obsessed with detailing every novel or movie Hutch (and everyone else) reads or watches during this time. It’s boring, but this is something he does in every novel in this series (and in his Benedict series). It’s not confined just to this one, and it rarely does a thing to advance the story.

I hate to say this, but I cannot recommend this novel. It's nothing like up to the standard of the rest of this series, and I have to question why it was even written. I do recommend the others in this series, however.