Jack McDevitt's 2006 Nebula Award winning novel is the third in his Alex Benedict series, following A Talent for War and Polaris, and tells of a search for a lost colony.
Wescott knew he was dead. There seemed little chance for Margaret, either. Or for his daughter. He had followed the instruction and stayed inside and now he lay beneath tons of ice and rock. He could hear weeping and screams, lost in the dark around him.
Jack McDevitt's 2006 Nebula Award winning novel -- the third in his Alex Benedict series, following A Talent for War and Polaris -- hits the ground running, but then meanders, as an actual prologue is followed by what is in effect a second one. It's entertaining, but meandering nonetheless.
Thirty-one years later, Alex and his assistant Chase Kolpath land on an airless world littered with abandoned habitations, but find that they are a day too late. Other artifact-hunters have beaten them to the site, and have left the latest almanac to taunt them.
It is only after their return and attending of a subsequent dinner (more meandering) that McDevitt truly gets down to business. A local woman visits them with a plastic cup so old and obscure that at first the name of the ship is mis-translated, but which turns out to be the starship Seeker, which disappeared fully nine thousand years before.
The woman claims that her boyfriend gave it to her shortly before they separated, but has no provenance, which immediately arouses Chase and Alex's suspicions. It emerges that it was left to her boyfriend, who is a violent bully by his father, a career burgular.
After a succession of dead ends in which Chase travels to a space station amongst other places, they locate the likely owner, Delia Westcott, the daughter referred to in the prologue. Her parent's behaviour in the months before they died leads Alex to suspect that they had found the Seeker, and were hunting an even bigger prize -- the lost colony world of Margolia.
But there are people who do not want Alex and Chase to succeed, and will kill to stop them. McDevitt has fun playing with his reader's expectations in both this regard, and in relation to what the Margolians are like -- several times Chase watches entertainment holos featuring the Margolians as either super-villains, or beings who have advaced far beyond humanity.
The other self-indulgence that McDevitt allows himself is to take potshots at current events and trends that have displeased him, for example celebrity interviewers get short shrift, as does the current intolerance of the US administration toward dissent -- the issue here is that McDevitt isn't the most subtle writer around.
In many ways, Seeker is a curiously old-fashioned book. Ten thousand years in the future, mankind has -- in contrast to the futures of more flamboyant writers such as Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow -- hardly changed at all. Colonies settled are thoroughly Earth-like, people by and large look and behave exactly as they do today (there are no implants, uploads or downloads) and there AIs are basically WASP holograms.
But that very element of familiarity goes a long way toward explaining McDevitt's popularity. He is regularly compared to Arthur C. Clarke, and his love of exploration and rationality are indeed reminiscent of Clarke, but in his solid championing of decency and the ordinary man prevailing, the author he is most like is Clifford D. Simak. In a world that is often -- especially to Americans -- unstable and threatening, that innate decency is more appealing than ever, and explains some of Seeker's success.
Some, but not all: Seeker is in it's own right a very appealing book.
