SF. Another excellent example of writer's stuff. Am now a big fan of McDevitt

McDevitt, Jack. Eternity Road. Eos, 2004.
Jack McDevitt has written more than two dozen novels that routinely put him on the shortlist for the major awards in science fiction. His novels featuring Pricilla Hutchins and Alex Benedict provide entertaining explorations of Xenoarchaeology. Eternity Road, by contrast, is an earthbound postapocalyptic quest novel that does not seem as well thought out as most of McDevitt’s work. The story begins centuries after war and plagues have depopulated most of the planet. In the southern Mississippi Valley, villagers admire the ancient Roadbuilders who built the broken and partially buried concrete highways. Most of the continent has returned to a primeval forest, and travel is hampered by dangerous animals and brigands. A small team sets out to find a cache of books rumored to be somewhere near the Great Lakes. Unfortunately, McDevitt’s ideas about what kinds of technology and buildings might have survived don’t always seem credible. His world is not as fantastic as the Road Warrior movies, but disbelief is not always easy to suspend. 3 stars. ( )

All that's left of civilization is ruins - roads, bridges, buildings, and a very few surviving books to help us make sense of the roadmakers' culture. There was an expedition to Haven that returned not only empty-handed, but with all the expedition members save one dead.

That's the scenario of Eternity Road. Against this background, a party of explorers seeks out "Haven", the mythical site of a cache of Roadmaker artifacts. The characters are memorable, likeable (mostly), and the story stayed with me. My favorite book my Mr. McDevitt so far.

(You can also see this review on my blog.) ( )

Eternity Road

First Impressions:

I love Jack McDevitt’s space opera series such as his Priscilla Hutchins books (about a woman space pilot and her adventures – a comment on the space program) and Infinity Beach (a warp to another planet but on Native American property).

This one is different! Not to belabor the plot since other reviewers did a better job, but the story centers around a dystopian society, about a thousand years after ours bit the dust in “The Plague.” It’s a vague plague (yeah, sorry), since there’s not a lot about it in the story.

The story starts out with the remnants of a journey to Haven, a place where the remains of The Roadmakers (that’s us) still exist and there are books there. Books are rare and to find any is amazing. Odd that after a thousand years the society is still quite primitive, up to a Cowboy style civilization, complete with repeater guns and horses.

Chaka is our strong female lead and she wants to find out about the death of her brother. She forms a group and sets out to find out what’s happened. Along the way she meets ancient Roadmaker machines that still operate. Labeled as demons and magic, these machines are somewhat sentient and there’s a bit of humor in dealing with them.

After many adventures and unfortunately many deaths (several good characters were killed off unnecessarily in my opinion) Haven is located. In fact its location and technological discoveries start turning the place around.

Bottom Line, Observations:

Eternity Road is not a bad novel, just takes 200 pages to get going. But once we’re going, the adventures kept my interest and the losses shocked. The discoveries interested me and piqued the curious bone. Recommended.

Interesting that McDevitt, as he has done before, explores the theme of what a sentient computer would do after being unable to live life as a being, other than commit suicide. This theme is explored in one of his short stories in the collection Cryptic, an anthology that I highly recommend.

Enjoy.


( )

I enjoyed this story, although it seemed to take forever to get going and then to get anywhere.

Centuries after a plague wipes out most humans and the civilizations of our own time fall (one mention indicates at least 700 years), a small group sets out on horseback from a Mississippi settlement to try to find a (possibly mythical) location known as Haven. Legend has it that remnants of the lost cultures have been hidden away there, to await a future where they can be of use. A first mission 9 years earlier ended in all but one person dead, and the survivor refused to discuss what happened, so these travelers rely on some drawings they find after his death and on marks they recognize as directional indicators left by the previous expedition's guide. The towns growing up along the Mississippi have always known that a great civilization preceded them because they're surrounded by the rotting ruins of buildings, highways, and technology. But how such wonders were possible is beyond current imagining, and there are more discoveries to be made on the trip itself.

Although published less than 20 years ago, this book is reminiscent of earlier SF writers and is mostly oriented towards the human experience. ( )