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!
