Reviews and Comments

A Talent for War, by Jack McDevitt, was published in 1989. It’s the first in the series of books that follow Alex Benedict. The series is set far into the future when mankind has colonized a good portion of the galaxy, and the planets have their own cultures and histories.

Alex is an antiques dealer and the nephew of famed archeologist Gabe Benedict. Gabe has passed away leaving a mystery for Alex to uncover. The adventure leads him to confront an enemy of mankind and the find of a lifetime.

I wasn’t too sure how I’d like this book when I first started reading it. There were a lot of times where the action seemed to drag, but now that I’ve finished reading it, all of the seemingly minor details were quite important. For the story to make sense at the end, the I had to learn about a war between humans and the “mutes” that happened over 200 years ago. The first half of the book feels like a history lesson while McDevitt sets the reader up for the end of the story.

I can’t wait to see what’s in store for Alex in the next book, Polaris.

Starhawk, by Jack McDevitt, was first published in 2013. It’s part of the Prescilla Hutchins stories as a prequel. The story follows Hutch as she qualifies as an interstellar pilot and how she tries to find her way in her career. If you’ve read Engine of the Gods, Chindi, or Omega, you’ll be familiar with Hutch later in her career.

As I read the previously mentioned stores, I wondered about how Prescilla had become Hutch, the revered interstellar pilot. We don’t get much of the story about what happened while she was training, but I think we get a good sense of it from her qualification flight with Jake. The first painful lesson she had to learn was that a good pilot sometimes has to sacrifice himself for the good of everyone else. We also get to see the toll that takes on people who knew and loved the pilot.

Through Jake, we get insights into why pilots are often single and why their relationships seldom work out; they’re world is just too different from that of the rest of us. After losing a close pilot friend, Jake re-evaluates his life choices and tries to settle down to a peaceful life on the ground. That comes to an end when he is called upon to pilot a research mission to a new world.

Hutch also learns that playing politics, as a pilot, is a good way to get blacklisted in her profession. Kosmik, an interstellar company, is terraforming a planet for human colonization, but they’re wiping out all the existing life in the process. This causes an outrage among activists who resort to terrorism to stop Kosmik from going any further. Hutch refuses to take another load of needed cargo to the world where Kosmik is working. As a result, nobody else will hire her and she’s stuck on the wheel doing administrative work.

I liked getting to see how Hutch grows into her job. You can really feel her eagerness to get out among the stars, but I think she really needed the time on the wheel to find herself. There are plenty of twists and turns to keep you in the story throughout the novel, too. I highly recommend this one if you’re a space opera fan. Jack McDevitt proves, again, that he belongs up there with Clarke, Asimov, and Bova.

2010: Odyssey Two is the second book in the Dave Bowman/HAL 9000 series. While the books in the series are considered sequels, the timeline and story change a little due to historical events and discoveries in the real world.

Dr. Haywood Floyd embarks on a journey to Jupiter to recover the Discovery and investigate “Big Brother”, another monolith found at the LaGrange point between IO and Jupiter. He’s joined by Dr. Chandra, HAL’s designer, and Walter Curnow, the chief engineer who oversaw the construction of the Discovery. They’ve hitched a ride with the Russians on the Alexi Leonov because they needed a quick departure due to the decay of Discovery’s orbit.

This book was written in 1982 and the movie was produced in 1984. The movie follows the book for the most part. As usual, the book has more details than the movie. I love the movie just as much as I love the book. I remember watching it as a kid; it was cutting edge technology at the time. Today, the movie is quite dated like 2001. I often wonder about how it might be remade with technology that was actually available in 2010. No, we don’t quite have the engineering capability to build large spaceships or to employ hibernation, but we did have talking computers. All of the old CRT monitors could be replaced with LCD panels. I also doubt there would be quite as many mechanical switches to deal with.

I loved the details about the planet Jupiter itself. To this day, its interior is still quite mysterious because we just don’t have any way to probe deep enough to understand anything. It’s the same with all the gas giants in the outer solar system. I’m a bit disappointed that we haven’t really explored Jupiter’s or Saturn’s moons in detail. It is generally accepted that there is probably life on Europa. There has been talk of sending a probe to drill through the ice, but we haven’t quite figured out how to ensure we don’t introduce any contaminants into the water underneath. I’m sure we’ll get there one day.

If you ever wanted to know why we haven’t ventured out into the solar system yet, you should read this book. Arthur C. Clarke always does a magnificent job describing day to day life. We are so used to instant communication anywhere on the planet, but we have no way to maintain that across the vast distances between planets. The communication delays at such great distances alone make it difficult for a manned mission. That’s even before the problems of carrying water, food, and fuel. We’re getting better at water recycling, but not quite there yet. I think we will make more progress once we find a much cheaper and faster way to get to low earth orbit.