The Engines of God by Jack McDevitt

[Anthony G Williams]

I'd not come across this author's work until this one was chosen by the Classic SF discussion forum as a monthly read, but it sounded interesting enough for me to get hold of a copy.

The Engines of God does indeed have a classic SF plot: ancient alien remains are found scattered around the galaxy following the discovery of faster-than-light space travel. Most of them are elegant sculptures – including one in our Solar System on Iapetus, a moon of Saturn. But more puzzling are some starkly contrasting blocky structures, to a rigid arithmetical formula, close to planets which have, or had, civilisations apparently incapable of space travel. Furthermore, these structures seemed to be linked in some way to disastrous collapses of the native civilisations.

Archeologists are on the case, trying to discover more about the various aliens and their relationships. But their best hope – a well-preserved ancient temple on a planet where the natives have died out – is threatened by a terraforming project to create a new Earth, as the old one is heading steadily into the environmental disaster zone.

The heroine of the tale is space pilot and amateur archaeologist Priscilla Hutchins, who works alongside the professionals as they battle with deadlines and try to grasp the significance of what they are finding. The plot steadily widens in scope and accelerates in pace as more discoveries are made, and there is a thunderous finale in the best traditions of wide-screen SF when what had appeared to be an abstract historical problem becomes horrifyingly real.

The book has some flaws: the story contains some padding in stretching to over 500 pages, for example detailed descriptions of the play-acting the characters get up to while on a long voyage. There is also an irrelevant and rather long section concerning a visit to a planet that ends disastrously, but which doesn't advance the plot at all. And while the characterisation is generally adequate, the heroine never really comes alive and the treatment of all of the female characters is a bit clichéd: they are all amazingly attractive, and Hutchins is repeatedly told by admiring men just how beautiful she is. Despite these criticisms it is a gripping tale, its hugely ambitious plot the first in a long while that has managed to spark in me some of the "sense of wonder" which drew me to SF in the first place. Recommended.

I see that although this was written as a stand-alone, several other tales subsequently appeared which are set in the same universe and feature the same principal character. More to add to my reading pile!

(An extract from my SFF blog: Science Fiction & Fantasy)

 

[J-Sun]

The book has some flaws: the story contains some padding in stretching to over 500 pages, for example detailed descriptions of the play-acting the characters get up to while on a long voyage. There is also an irrelevant and rather long section concerning a visit to a planet that ends disastrously, but which doesn't advance the plot at all. And while the characterisation is generally adequate, the heroine never really comes alive and the treatment of all of the female characters is a bit clichéd: they are all amazingly attractive, and Hutchins is repeatedly told by admiring men just how beautiful she is.

I agree with all that and would add more if I could remember better.

Despite these criticisms it is a gripping tale, its hugely ambitious plot the first in a long while that has managed to spark in me some of the "sense of wonder" which drew me to SF in the first place. Recommended.

Hm. I wish I had gotten that but it just didn't work for me. There were one or two "life or death" sequences that were pretty gripping to me in a small-scale way but the story as a whole wasn't.

I see that although this was written as a stand-alone, several other tales subsequently appeared which are set in the same universe and feature the same principal character. More to add to my reading pile!

I know at least one person likes subsequent installments more than the first, but it turned me off from the whole series and almost turned me off the writer. It was the first book of his I read (though I'd read a stray story or two). However, I also gave A Talent for War a try which, like the Academy/Hutchins novels, was a stand-alone for awhile (much longer, even) before being turned into a series. The last McDevitt I've read so far was the second Benedict book, Polaris, which was okay, and I have the third, but I'm still on the fence about the series as a whole. And I liked Eternity Road which I read in between and which, so far, is still a stand-alone - hopefully it'll stay that way. But, if The Engines of God did it for you, that'd probably be the place to continue, just like I am so far with the Benedict series, because the first one of that worked for me.

 

[Parson]

I've read a lot of Jack McDevitt and I've liked them all pretty well. He's not by any stretch my favorite author but he generally tells a good tale. The subsequent novels are really not a series. They do not build on each other hardly at all. It's the main characters which tie the stories together.

 

[Bugg]

I read this a couple of years ago and enjoyed it. I agree about the characters and the padding. I thought it got a little bogged down in the latter stages, and the characters made perhaps a couple too many rash decisions which managed to put everyone in danger, but there was enough to keep me interested, and McDevitt seems pretty good at creating and ratcheting up tension.

At the time I had difficulty getting hold of the next book, but I saw that there were new paperback editions released in the UK last year, and ebook versions, so I'll definitely be reading more - I'm also interested in his 'Alex Benedict' series.

 

[Vertigo]

Well I seem to have found this worse that most!

As humanity begins to explore the stars there are three factors that have quickly become apparent. There are precious few inhabitable planets out there and although evidence of alien races have been found none seem to have achieved advanced technology bar one; Inexplicable evidence of an ancient highly advanced race has been found but no evidence of the aliens themselves. These two factors combine on the one unoccupied planet so far discovered that offers the possibility of terraforming but that also has the remains of an extinct low technology race that just maybe holds clues to the elusive missing advanced aliens. This inevitably results in conflict between the exo-archaeologists who want to examine the remains and the terraformers who can’t wait to begin the terraforming process, destroying all architectural remains in the process (melting the ice caps and bombarding with ice asteroids).

An interesting premise that is, for me, let down so badly by both the writing and science that I eventually quit around the halfway mark (depressingly making it my second DNF on the trot!). The book was written in the mid-nineties but felt more like a pulp SF book written in the sixties showing typical disregard for actual science. The whole story ended up lacking plausibility in so many ways that I just couldn’t continue.

Spoiler

To name just a few: the terraforming is due to take a century or more so to delay by a few more days, hours, weeks or even years would not make any appreciable difference, yet they are so desperate to get the archaeologists off the planet that they send one of their asteroids down early to send a tsunami over their base. Really? This isn’t war yet they are prepared to endanger the lives of all the archaeologists rather than let them stay another couple of days. Then in retaliation Hutch, the Archaeologists’ pilot, constructs a fake asteroid from some kind of expanded polystyrene which she puts into an orbit designed to impact the terraformers’ space station: “‘It’ll bend a few things,’ she said, ‘and pop some rivets. But they’ll see it coming, and they’ll either get off the station or button up. They’ll be fine.’ It’s, apparently, going to hit the station at 7,000kph! Light polystyrene or not, even in the mid-nineties it was obvious that anything hitting a space station at that kind of speed is going do a lot of damage and certainly endanger life, but no this is just meant to be a joke on them for payback for the tsunami. Am I really expected to believe this is how people will behave in space in the future? As for the science, there is a moon orbiting this planet and there is a structure there with two points believed to be pointing out into space at another star – a major clue to the missing aliens. Wait a minute, this moon is orbiting the planet which in turn is orbiting the star; any two points on the moon will track around all over the galaxy/universe! Then there’s the way the men all seem so touchy feely with the women, squeezing shoulder brushing cheeks etc. That was just plain creepy! Sorry I just couldn’t turn a blind eye to all this rubbish.

This is my second attempt at a Jack McDevitt book and I’m afraid it will be my last. Two stars instead of one because there did seem to be a good story hiding somewhere behind all that rubbish!

2/5 stars

 

[DeltaV]

Interesting comments on The Engines of God specifically, and the novels of Jack McDevitt in general. I read The Engines of God when it first came out (the back cover of my copy has a lander on it that looks suspiciously like an Eagle from Space 1999) and recall enjoying it at the time. I've always liked space opera/xeno-archeology stories, and McDevitt seems to have found a niche in the SF field writing them.

I re-read it a few years ago ... I only remembered the general outline of the story ... but I was rather disappointed the second time through. Have you ever read a novel years later and wondered why you liked it the first time? That was my experience with The Engines of God. Basically because of the same points that have been mentioned in previous comments. I then read Deep Six and Chindi to see how the series went. And as I struggled to finish Chindi, I have not read any more in the Academy series.

One thing that I find annoying in SF in general, and in McDevitt's novels in particular, is the poor decision making by some of the main characters. Now I know that human history is littered with decisions that were thought to be a Good Idea At The Time that ended up in disaster ("Lets sail this ship at full speed through all these icebergs..." etc. etc.). But I would hope and think that space exploration would involve a tiny more thought about possible consequences.

I'll mention a couple of points that bugged me in The Engines of God in Spoilers, beyond what has been written elsewhere.

Spoiler: Spoilers - TEoG and Academy Series

The Beta Pacifica excursion is a long list of bad decisions. Imagine that you are going to jump in hyperspace to a planet that might have advanced intelligent life (which, IIRC, was the premise for their visit. To find the Monument-Makers).

"Hey, let's exit hyperspace right above their planet! That'll save all that time travelling through normal space from out-system. I'm sure the aliens won't mind us popping out right above them. Ooops. There's something in the way! And we can't restart the engines?!" Crash.

I think if you are going to visit any planet with possible intelligent life, it might be prudent to exit hyperspace quite some distance away, and spend some quiet time just listening and observing. Ditto for landing on the planet.

"Ah, let's just get down there! We don't need no stinking robotic probes. Or orbital surveys. I wanna get exploring! What? Someone just got eaten? Oh, well. That's what the red shirts are for!"

I guess I'd make a lousy SF writer. No excitement in my stories.

I do like the character of Priscilla Hutchins, and would have liked to have seen more depth added to her personality, flaws as well as virtues.

Unfortunately, I also found the central idea of the destructive Omega clouds a little hard to accept, at least as presented. They really are left as a cliff-hanger (so I guess McDevitt was planning on a sequel even then? ). But they did not feature in Deep Six and Chindi. Strange.

PS Good catch, Vertigo, on the moon structure. I didn't think about that, but you are right. Seems weird that McDevitt didn't think that through.

PPS Don't be Priscilla Hutchins boyfriend. They seem to all get whacked. Even the plant that had sex with her in Deep Six ended up dying in the big explosion... (Yeah. A bit of odd writing, that. Didn't make a lot of sense.)

I've also read Firebird and Coming Home in the Benedict series. Interesting idea linking the two novels but not enough there to keep me reading other stories in the series. Unless I'm at home in bed with a cold, or maybe looking for a light SF adventure to read.

Vertigo mentioned that he thought The Engines of God was like a pulp novel. I would maybe go a tad further and say that a lot of McDevitt's books are like pulp novels. Enjoy the ride and don't ask too many questions.

 

[Vertigo]

Interesting comments on The Engines of God specifically, and the novels of Jack McDevitt in general. I read The Engines of God when it first came out (the back cover of my copy has a lander on it that looks suspiciously like an Eagle from Space 1999) and recall enjoying it at the time. I've always liked space opera/xeno-archeology stories, and McDevitt seems to have found a niche in the SF field writing them.

I re-read it a few years ago ... I only remembered the general outline of the story ... but I was rather disappointed the second time through. Have you ever read a novel years later and wondered why you liked it the first time? That was my experience with The Engines of God. Basically because of the same points that have been mentioned in previous comments. I then read Deep Six and Chindi to see how the series went. And as I struggled to finish Chindi, I have not read any more in the Academy series.

One thing that I find annoying in SF in general, and in McDevitt's novels in particular, is the poor decision making by some of the main characters. Now I know that human history is littered with decisions that were thought to be a Good Idea At The Time that ended up in disaster ("Lets sail this ship at full speed through all these icebergs..." etc. etc.). But I would hope and think that space exploration would involve a tiny more thought about possible consequences.

I'll mention a couple of points that bugged me in The Engines of God in Spoilers, beyond what has been written elsewhere.

Spoiler: Spoilers - TEoG and Academy Series

The Beta Pacifica excursion is a long list of bad decisions. Imagine that you are going to jump in hyperspace to a planet that might have advanced intelligent life (which, IIRC, was the premise for their visit. To find the Monument-Makers).

"Hey, let's exit hyperspace right above their planet! That'll save all that time travelling through normal space from out-system. I'm sure the aliens won't mind us popping out right above them. Ooops. There's something in the way! And we can't restart the engines?!" Crash.

I think if you are going to visit any planet with possible intelligent life, it might be prudent to exit hyperspace quite some distance away, and spend some quiet time just listening and observing. Ditto for landing on the planet.

"Ah, let's just get down there! We don't need no stinking robotic probes. Or orbital surveys. I wanna get exploring! What? Someone just got eaten? Oh, well. That's what the red shirts are for!"

I guess I'd make a lousy SF writer. No excitement in my stories.

I do like the character of Priscilla Hutchins, and would have liked to have seen more depth added to her personality, flaws as well as virtues.

Unfortunately, I also found the central idea of the destructive Omega clouds a little hard to accept, at least as presented. They really are left as a cliff-hanger (so I guess McDevitt was planning on a sequel even then? ). But they did not feature in Deep Six and Chindi. Strange.

PS Good catch, Vertigo, on the moon structure. I didn't think about that, but you are right. Seems weird that McDevitt didn't think that through.

PPS Don't be Priscilla Hutchins boyfriend. They seem to all get whacked. Even the plant that had sex with her in Deep Six ended up dying in the big explosion... (Yeah. A bit of odd writing, that. Didn't make a lot of sense.)

I've also read Firebird and Coming Home in the Benedict series. Interesting idea linking the two novels but not enough there to keep me reading other stories in the series. Unless I'm at home in bed with a cold, or maybe looking for a light SF adventure to read.

Vertigo mentioned that he thought The Engines of God was like a pulp novel. I would maybe go a tad further and say that a lot of McDevitt's books are like pulp novels. Enjoy the ride and don't ask too many questions.

Yes, absolutely agree with all your points @DeltaV; some of the decisions and motivations were just implausible exactly as I'd expect from pulp SF from the '60s/'70s. Another one similar to your 'I wanna go exploring' was the 'oh didn't we tell you about the huge mantis-like insects? Just don't move and we'll be with you in a few minutes' after Hutch goes exploring within an hour of arriving on the planet with no warning about local fauna.

And I very much agree with your comments re disappointment. I tend not to reread old classics I've read years ago for exactly that reason and I'm pretty sure that had I read this back when it first came out I'd have probably loved it or at least liked it a lot more than I did on this read.