I just finished reading
The Engines of God as my first Jack McDevitt book. It features humans with normal lifespans without any augmentations. It features those humans going out and doing things across interstellar distances in a high-tech future. There's been no Singularity. It's written in a straight-forward manner. It clocks in at 419 pages in my paperback edition rather than 700 or a 1000. And, not meaning to be offensive but, since it seems Americans don't write SF any more, McDevitt has the bonus of being American. (It seems like books used to have spelling and punctuation converted when transported across the pond but don't seem to these days.)
So everything should be just exactly perfect. Except I didn't much care for it. It starts off with a brief scene and then goes into a larger section in which 20 names are thrown at me and only a couple matter. Then it seems to wander from chunk to chunk until it ends in an unsatisfying manner. In researching the author further, I come across comments from him like:
What were the omega clouds?
I must confess I had no idea. Nor did I think it was important, or even wise, to reveal a source. They were far more interesting as simply an enigmatic presence in a universe that grows more complex, more subtle, and more mysterious, with every revelation. To explain what they were was to reduce them to the mundane, rather like an asteroid or a dwarf star, and thereby deprive them of their exotic nature.
To me, those are the words of a man who has no business writing science fiction. I enjoyed some of the
X-Files for a few seasons but that's
not what I want in my SF reading. If he thinks asteroids and dwarf stars are "mundane" and not "exotic" then we just aren't speaking the same language. If more interest and wonder and excitement doesn't derive from
understanding, but from some fuzzy metaphysical hand-wavium and he's just stringing readers along with nonsense... well, again, that's not why I read SF.
I hear many references to McDevitt and mystery, but mysteries
have a solution and the delight is in either working it out yourself or marvelling at the author's (or his protagonist's) cleverness in working it out. There's no mystery if there's no solution - there's just nonsense with the appearance of a mystery.
In searching this site for this author, I came across a thread about "Authors you wish you liked" and I think McDevitt is one. As I say, he's got all the elements I cited in this book as just about the perfect thing I'd want to read but I was unimpressed with the exposition, plotting, and "ending".
Of his remaining books, the Alex Benedict series sounds interesting but I'm not willing to try another series. Of the independent ones,
Eternity Road sounds interesting except I'm afraid the main society would be too technologically primitive to appeal to me. It would depend on how it was handled, I guess. And
Infinity Beach sounds interesting but might be too "regressive" for me. I'm not sure what the actual thrust or point of that one is, but it sounds like an interesting dilemma.
Anyway - those are my impressions, positive and negative. I know no one can answer for me but I'd be interested if anyone thought I should give him another try or give up. And, if another try, are one of the two I mentioned good avenues, or should I try another approach?
.
