Seeker

Good Grief. I just lost my review.

Here's a summary, alas.

'06 Nebula winner, equal parts Space Opera and Noir Mystery, but that really translates mostly into Future History Archeology, with a treasure-hunting bent, twists and turns, lots of interesting characters, and lost spacecraft and lost colonies.

Was I really happy about the last twist and the epilogue? Hell yes.

All this takes place about 10k in the future, but there's a legend of a lost colony gone 9k ago before the advent of FTL travel or communications, and it's the subject of much attention and drama. Atlantis, anyone? Well what happens when weird things start showing up, crazy mysteries get unearthed, and our favorite team get involved in the hunt?

It's a mystery! Most of the show more fun is all in the reveals and the character interactions, and I'll be honest, I like Chase better as the narrator because she just might be smarter than the titular MC who's getting kinda pushed out of his own series. :) It's not a bad alteration. :) She's a tough Noir investigator.

I'm having a lot of fun with these novels! It's pretty much the most fun I've had with archeology novels I've had, but perhaps that's because I just haven't read the right ones. Still, I love the mix with Space Opera. :) show less

Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath, antiquities dealers and sometimes amateur slueths of the distant future, are back, this time investigating the mysterious appearance of what seems to be a plastic cup from the ship that founded a legendary lost colony.

After being nominated for the Nebula many times, it's easy to see why McDevitt finally got his award with this book. This isn't a book that tackles profound, earth-shattering issues. But Seeker offers all of the strengths of a typical McDevitt novel (i.e., an unpretentious, nicely paced, and intruguing mystery set in a well defined future). To this formula it adds a brilliantly moving conclusion that brought tears to my eyes and one of the more intriguing lost colony concepts you'll ever show more run across.

Congratulations, Jack. show less

OK, first off, know that I have a bias against science fiction stories that are set in the far future (in this case, 9,000 years from now) but the characters act and live just like late 20th-early 21st century middle-class Westerners. It's just not believable to me and I think it lacks imagination.

Setting that aside, it's a reasonably good yarn about a duo of antique dealers who make a living pillaging the ruins of civilizations on far-flung worlds, to the annoyance of archeologists, surveyors, and museum curators. They find something that sends them searching for a semi-mythological ancient civilization—kind of like Atlantis, only it's a lost planet.

The plot moves along OK, but don't read this book looking for character show more development.

Some interesting telepathic aliens.

Contender for the "Silliest MacGuffin" award (a 9,000 year old plastic coffee cup). show less

An excellent piece of speculative fiction that takes place thousands of years into the future. The story follows future archeologist/treasure hunters who are searching for the fate of an ancient earth colony who were lost and never heard from again. The ideas are thought provoking and novel, the characters are likable and the story is well-paced and engrossing. The story mades me wonder about the decal covered plastic cups that come with your child's happy meal. If it was found ten thousand years from now by an archeologist, how much would it be worth?

Now I'll have to read the other books in the series. I'm impressed by McDevitt..this book, and "Infinity Beach", demonstrate him as a first-rate detective writer. With an entire galaxy to frame his stories he has enough room for creating some decently complex and intriguing tales. It's also interesting that he tends to assign fairly unprepossessing women as protagonists. A throw-away character asks for an estimate on an old mug and sets in motion a quest for a 9,000 year old utopian settlement deemed to have been lost in space. To add to the tension there's a group of anti-souvenir fanatics that are willing to kill in order to stop the poaching of historical artifacts. Clues and some pretty impressive deductions, and a few lucky show more guesses, guide the heroes to find the end of this multi-millennial mystery. Every time they find enough to end the search, they find a reason to continue beyond the end such that the story continues after some brief respites in the action. show less

http://nhw.livejournal.com/885828.html

This year's Nebula winner, which I bought expecting not to enjoy much - the Nebulas have been as much miss as hit for me in recent years. I'm therefore a little surprised to report that I really enjoyed it. As a lapsed historian and even more lapsed archaeologist, I lapped up McDevitt's portrayal of a far-future quest for a lost human colony, driven by the discovery of a plastic cup with an inscription in the forgotten language of English, with an imaginative astronomical twist at the end of the story. Perhaps taken as a novel about the future it is a little unexciting, but I think it should be read also as a novel about the past, and how we will deal with the past in the future, and I found it show more pretty satisfying on that score. show less

This is a solid space adventure that kept me turning the pages. But the Nebula for Best Novel of 2006? Really? We're a long way down from The Dispossessed and Timescape. The framework is routine. What happened to the lost colony? The characters are equally rote. Chase is your basic gumshoe, but in space, and Alex is just a guy who signs checks. The villain's motivation is ridiculous. When the mystery of Margolia is solved, I could only summon up a mild "hmm."