Time Travelers Never Die by Jack McDevitt

Spoiler Level: Medium.  Probably less than the back cover. 

I love Jack McDevitt's novels.  I love time travel stories.  And now Jack McDevitt has written a time travel story?!?  HOT DIGGITY!

As usual for Jack McDevitt, it's a page turner that kept me up way past my bed time every night since I started reading it.  And just like in Infinity Beach, the text on the back reveals a story element that doesn't happen until page 294 out of a 385 page book.  This is why I deliberately no longer read the back covers of books that I know I'm going to read anyway.

Part of what makes McDevitt's books so wonderful to read is that they have the thrill of exploration all through them.  In Eternity Road it's a future generation rediscovering our world, in The Engines of God it's mankind discovering the secrets behind alien monuments, in Infinity Beach it's humanity daring to not give up on discovering if we're alone in the universe.  All of them do a great job not just of crafting an amazing world, but in conveying the thrill of discovery of that world and the exploratory spirit of the characters in the books.   And McDevitt takes that same approach here, using his version of a time machine called a "converter" -- something of a cross between an Omni from Voyagers! and a Nintendo DS -- not just for traveling in time, but for using time travel to explore time.  To actually explore history itself. 

In addition to the risks inherit with getting caught up in dangerous moments in history, McDevitt adds a new reason to be cautious:  it seems that if you try to do something that's going to upset the timeline or create a temporal paradox, the universe attempts to correct the paradox by eliminating the element creating it, ie by eliminating the time traveler in question.  As a result, our heroes end up coming up with a lot of very, very creative uses for the converter time machines to get out of jams, but they have to do them all in a very cautious way so as not to create even the smallest paradox.

The book is engaging from start to finish, his temporal mechanics are fun to follow, and he makes many different points and people in history come alive.  The book is everything I'd hoped for.

Moonfall by Jack McDevitt

Spoiler Level: Medium

Wow, just absolutely wow. I may have loved this book even more than McDevitt's Eternity Road, which is saying a lot.

Earth is officially opening Moonbase, the first permanent international lunar colony, when a new, unusual comet is spotted just days before it's due to impact with the Moon.

So just how serious a threat is this? Scientists disagree. Some argue that while it will definitely spell bad news for Moonbase, the point of impact and distance between the Earth and the Moon mean it will have little to no effect on the Earth itself short of losing lunar tides. Other scientists argue this could be an extinction event. Guess which ones the politicians decide to listen to?

And that's part of what makes this book so amazing-- the indifference of so many people to the thought of losing the moon. I actually went around and started asking people if they'd care if the moon went away. (Most did, but a few didn't.)

The book is set in an election year, and every step the politicians take during the crisis is done with an eye on how it will come across to the public. What's even more amazing to me, however, is how prescient the book was. It was published in 1998, before 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. There's a scene where the President is in a private meeting being advised that yes, parts of the moon could impact on Earth and cause tsunamis, but the President's reaction is if that happens, they'll deal with it then. It plays out almost exactly as the video of President Bush being warned that the levees in New Orleans would not hold. Downright eerie.

The book just builds and builds and builds and never lets up from beginning to end. I never wanted to put it down. McDevitt books are always an awesome read, but this one doubly so.

Oh, and on a completely unrelated note... this is post #200! Not bad for a silly little project that I thought I'd lose interest in within a month.

Infinity Beach by Jack McDevitt

SPOILER LEVEL: Low

I love books by Jack McDevitt. I first discovered his work when I was visiting Derek, where he'd left a copy of Eternity Road in his bathroom and I got hooked into it. Luckily he was kind enough to loan it to me... that or he just didn't want me to take up residence in his bathroom. Either way, I've loved McDevitt's books ever since.

Infinity Beach takes place approximately 1000 years from now. Mankind has reached out for the stars, and successfully colonized eight new worlds, and has sent expeditions to seek out new life and new civilizations...

...and found nothing. Zip. Nada. Bupkiss. No alien civilizations, no ruins of dead alien civilizations, no small fuzzy animals, no insects, no plants, no microbes, no nothing.

And as a result, mankind has gotten bored with the whole process of even looking and is slowly drawing back in to the "Nine Worlds." Humanity has all the room and resources they need. They've become content with what they have, and don't really see the need to keep looking for something new.

Enter our hero, Kim Brandywine, whose sister was on the final deep-space ship that searched for alien life and then disappeared immediately after returning home from it. Kim begins to try and learn what happened to her sister, and the story is off and running.

Well, off and casually strolling, more like. At first it seems like the story is taking a while to really go anywhere, and then I realized, that's the point. Humanity has become so content with what they have that they're in absolutely no hurry to find out anything new. The starships are designed not just like luxury yachts, but like luxury houses, with balconies and "terraces" and plush carpeting and kitchens stocked with wine and cheese... and my God, do people eat a lot of wine and cheese in this book. Need to review some important stolen documents? Okay, let's break out the wine and cheese and get comfortable while we're going over them. Even Kim's main confidant, who supports her and is with her every step of the way, still repeatedly stops and asks her "Are you sure you want to do this? What's the point?" McDevitt does an incredible job of building a world that is slowly decaying but is enjoying themselves so much that they don't even see it. Not out of debauchery, not out of a lack or morality or greed or selfishness... just out of quiet, contented disinterest.

Finally Kim begins to get some answers, and in doing so starts rubbing her society the wrong way, because she's not content to leave things as they are. She wants to know more, and all anyone else is willing to tell her is "let it go." But needing to know what really happened to her sister on that last mission leads her to needing to know what they might have found, and if humanity really is alone after all.

And from there, the book truly is off and running.

I won't get into any more details from there, and if you're interested in reading the book based on what I've written, I recommend you not read the back cover either. It tells you the major plot points from pages 228, 232, and 334 out of a 510 page book. The back cover of a book should never, IMNSHO, never give you specifics about what happens beyond the main premise. As a rule, I'd stick to only describing anything that happens in the first fifth of the book, since that's usually the set-up. But I digress.

Infinity Beach is a great look at humanity, our strengths and our failings, and about what happens when our dreams fall asleep and what it takes to wake them up again. And best of all, it made me think, which is exactly what a great book should do.