Now this one really engaged my Sense of Wonder!

The story is OK: inrterstellar artefact collector unearths the uncomfortable truth about a 200-year dead military hero. If that was all there was to it, then that would be a dry read and not necessarily very exciting. But somehow, in his very direct and visual story-telling style, McDevitt conveys an incredible sense of the far-flung human society he has set the story in. There have been very few sf novels I have read where the ordinary reality of the extent of the human civilization depicted has come home to the reader; but in this novel, I WAS THERE. I felt a part of that society, and I grasped the size and extent of it, a society where Earth, the planet of origin, was very, very distant and not really all that important; and it didn't matter that that was so.

I have no idea how McDevitt did that, and in his later novels, whilst I have been struck by the televisual style he employs, I haven't been so transported to a different place. For me, this was real mind-expanding stuff, the sort of thing I started reading sf to find. ( )

This is the first book by Jack McDevitt that I have read. On the whole it was an engaging but not enthralling read. The universe McDevitt sets up is an interesting one, with an interesting history and political scene. The story unfolds within this backdrop, as the protaganist follows the clues left by his late uncle's archaeological investigations to dig deeper into the founding myths of the human confederacy and the war in which it was born. The mystery itself is interesting and one continues reading in order to discover just how far the reality was from the legends that have come to be regarded as the truth.

There are however, several flaws with the novel. The first is that it is very episodic, with the protagonist, Alex Benedict going from place to place and talking to different people. Each place or person provides some kind of engimatic piece of the larger puzzle, but particularly in the first half of the book, its hard to work up any sense of excitement about this as the clues are so vague. The encounters also seemed underdeveloped, each one severing to provide a clue and not really having any real life of their own.

This brings me to the second problem which is that the characters all all pretty much lifeless and cardboard. Even the protaganist seems underdeveloped and his motivations not very clear, despite the fact that the book is written in the first person. Some of the historical personalities come into slightly sharper focus, but they are painted with a very broad brush and their distance in time and in the narrative from the reader means that they are not very compelling.

Overall this is an interesting novel and kudos to Mr McDevitt for taking a very different approach to the usual military sf story, but its simplistic structure and poor characterisation undermine the depth of what the author was attempting to do. ( )

ZB9

A reluctant archaeologist takes up the hunt for relics from a 200 year-old war after his uncle dies. The history and historical characters in this book are much more interesting than the narrator, who spends most ot the book doing historical research. Why I found this a gripping page-turner, is still somewhat of a mystery to me. Whoever, the mystery of just what happened during the war and how, and why anyone would want to keep it a secret now, makes for some very compelling reading. I'm not sure it would work a second time through, hence my 3-stars, which mean I probably won't read the book again. But I'm glad I read it the first time. ( )

An interstellar artifact hunter searches for relics of a long past war which may change how people remember the hero of the war. A little tedious in place, but a good read. The ending was a bit of a suprise. ( )