Jack McDevitt's Seeker
Jul. 8th, 2007 11:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsThere are no spoilers.
"The logical heir to Clarke and Asimov!" "A novel of big questions!" are just two of the blurbs on the cover of Jack McDevitt's Seeker and, y'know, reading it, you'd expect there to be, like, big questions.
Instead, after getting through about 1/3rd of the book, I've got a reasonably sympathetic character who seems to have been borrowed from William Gibson, a bewilderingly shallow layer of Third Earth skinned over a random planet in a random corner of the galaxy, bad handwavery to justify the lack of any technology better than, oh, an iPhone circa 2015, even worse handwavery to deal with post-Smithian-levels of FTL nonsense, and a plot that asks no questions and gropes for no answers about the place of human beings in the universe.
Instead, it's an investigative novel, Indiana Jones In Space, with absolutely nothing SF about it except the backdrop, with our heroine gallavanting about the galaxy trying to find out who dropped a mysterious cup from a long lost colony into the hands of a burglar's girlfriend, and reporting back to her boss, the supposed brains of the outfit, who sends her out on more McGuffiny missions to learn details.
Now, I'm all for science fiction as backdrop; I write romances set on starships, but at least when I do that I consider the implications of the tech and the evolution of the society and how that affects my characters' stumbling into wuv, twuu wuv (or at least a decent roll in the low-gravity hay). McDevitt hasn't done any of that. The scene I read before the book hit the wall was of Chase, the heroine, going out to visit an abandoned Los Vegas-like city/theme park, in which the narrator mentions a brief fad, some twenty years earlier, when it became chic to go out and adventure in the "real world." But that's it; it's just a backdrop, a semi-post-apocalyptic setting in which to find a woman who has voluntarily given up her anti-aging regimen, so the heroine can interview her about the mysterious cup before she dies. If McDevitt was trying to contrast the woman's real but sensless decrepitude with the faux decrepitude around her, he failed. Especially when Chase, after giving the brief description, mentions that "everyone's using VR nowadays; no wonder so many people are fat."
Book, meet wall. Wall, meet book. (Not really; it was a library book, and I'm supposed to return it in good condition.) Snide asides about the current state of affairs and cheap ripoffs are not signs of an imagination at work. This is a novel written by someone who views novelwriting as "pipefitting for the mind," a workaday novel with no agonizing whatsoever behind it. Chase seems incredulous that someone would have spent money building up the theme park only to have it all close down: haven't these people done *anything* in the past 10,000 years (so we're told) to compensate for, adjust to, learn from, or otherwise deal with their apparent lack of technological or biological advancement and the cyclic nature of fads, economies, and governments?
And yet, Seeker seems to have won a Nebula. I'm trying to figure out who on the Nebula voting committee chose this book. I'm bewildered that a book of such a pedestrian nature, however competently written, was considered Nebula material.
Does it get any better? Or should I just return it now?
"The logical heir to Clarke and Asimov!" "A novel of big questions!" are just two of the blurbs on the cover of Jack McDevitt's Seeker and, y'know, reading it, you'd expect there to be, like, big questions.
Instead, after getting through about 1/3rd of the book, I've got a reasonably sympathetic character who seems to have been borrowed from William Gibson, a bewilderingly shallow layer of Third Earth skinned over a random planet in a random corner of the galaxy, bad handwavery to justify the lack of any technology better than, oh, an iPhone circa 2015, even worse handwavery to deal with post-Smithian-levels of FTL nonsense, and a plot that asks no questions and gropes for no answers about the place of human beings in the universe.
Instead, it's an investigative novel, Indiana Jones In Space, with absolutely nothing SF about it except the backdrop, with our heroine gallavanting about the galaxy trying to find out who dropped a mysterious cup from a long lost colony into the hands of a burglar's girlfriend, and reporting back to her boss, the supposed brains of the outfit, who sends her out on more McGuffiny missions to learn details.
Now, I'm all for science fiction as backdrop; I write romances set on starships, but at least when I do that I consider the implications of the tech and the evolution of the society and how that affects my characters' stumbling into wuv, twuu wuv (or at least a decent roll in the low-gravity hay). McDevitt hasn't done any of that. The scene I read before the book hit the wall was of Chase, the heroine, going out to visit an abandoned Los Vegas-like city/theme park, in which the narrator mentions a brief fad, some twenty years earlier, when it became chic to go out and adventure in the "real world." But that's it; it's just a backdrop, a semi-post-apocalyptic setting in which to find a woman who has voluntarily given up her anti-aging regimen, so the heroine can interview her about the mysterious cup before she dies. If McDevitt was trying to contrast the woman's real but sensless decrepitude with the faux decrepitude around her, he failed. Especially when Chase, after giving the brief description, mentions that "everyone's using VR nowadays; no wonder so many people are fat."
Book, meet wall. Wall, meet book. (Not really; it was a library book, and I'm supposed to return it in good condition.) Snide asides about the current state of affairs and cheap ripoffs are not signs of an imagination at work. This is a novel written by someone who views novelwriting as "pipefitting for the mind," a workaday novel with no agonizing whatsoever behind it. Chase seems incredulous that someone would have spent money building up the theme park only to have it all close down: haven't these people done *anything* in the past 10,000 years (so we're told) to compensate for, adjust to, learn from, or otherwise deal with their apparent lack of technological or biological advancement and the cyclic nature of fads, economies, and governments?
And yet, Seeker seems to have won a Nebula. I'm trying to figure out who on the Nebula voting committee chose this book. I'm bewildered that a book of such a pedestrian nature, however competently written, was considered Nebula material.
Does it get any better? Or should I just return it now?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-07-08 09:37 pm (UTC)You've just identified one of my problems in general with McDevitt's stories: namely, he does not think through the implications of technological progress.
We're fairly close, right now, to finding medical solutions for obesity, and given the obvious marketability of any such developments, we can expect that, within the next 50-100 years by the latest, the only people who will be fat will be those who are making intentional fashion statements. Yet McDevitt doesn't see why having lazy people become fat in a starfaring society CENTURIES in the future is implausible.
I think in another of his books he has fusion-powered starships coexist with an energy crisis on Earth such that people don't own personal cars any more, because, y'know, the oil ran out ... argh.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-08 09:59 pm (UTC)I find the whole attitude of anti-immortalism, that regards letting oneself age and die "naturally" in a society which has the technology to keep one alive in comfort and style, to be deeply disturbing. Yes, your death in such a manner would be "natural." So would dying of gangrene from a minor foot injury, rather than using antiseptics, antibiotics, and if necessary major surgery to avoid this fate.
So why should we regard someone who refuses anagathics as sane and an attractive example, but someone who refuses antibiotics as repuslively insane?
Yes, I do get why our current position of not having workable anagathic technology leads us to a "sour grapes" attitude toward immortality, but we should recognize this for the irrationality it is, rather than romanticize it.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-09 08:47 am (UTC)I realize that this is a metaphor, but just the thought of hay in freefall under any circumstances - let alone having sex amongst it - brought on some very funny mental imagery. :)