We Read Science Fiction

I’m tired. For the last week I’ve been staying up late reading as fast as I can. Last night I finished Seeker by Jack McDevitt and tonight I’m going to bed early. Seeker is my first exposure to Mr. McDevitt’s work and was a recommendation that Amazon gave me based on the other books I’ve purchased or reviewed there. I was skeptical at first since the back cover copy was quite cliche: “But their discovery raises more questions than it answers, drawing [the main characters] into the very heart of danger…” (Where do they come up with such crap?) After learning that it was the winner of the Nebula award in 2006, I took a gamble and added the book to another order I was making. I was happily surprised.

Summary: I’m not sure how this won the nebula award since it’s very light on new SF ideas, but it has a fantastic pace, great story telling and is hard to put down. Great for the beach or a vacation where you want entertainment but not a mental workout.

The basic idea is that 10,000 years in the future a pair of archaeologists turned grave-robber are looking for their next big score. When a new client brings them a cup that turns out to be over 9,000 years old they head out in search of it’s origin. They discover that the cup is from one of the first interstellar colonization efforts, and no one has heard from the colonists since.

By tracing the owners of the cup back through time they discover that the colony ship had been discovered adrift over 40 years earlier. Unfortunately the couple that found the ship dies in the first few pages of the book and the location of the ship is lost again. The main characters then begin a book-long journey to re-discover the ship and it’s secrets.

Seeker is the third in a series of space-mystery novels featuring the same main characters. I’ve never read either of the other two (Talent for War and Polaris) but I’ve read mixed reviews about each. Seeker was the first of the three to get consistently solid reviews (and won the Nebula), so I took the gamble.

Seeker is definitely formulaic, but in a good way. I compare it to the TV show House. You know he’s going to be an ass, you know someone is going to get sick with some weird disease and you know that over the next hour they’ll figure it out and save the day. In Seeker, you can see many of the twists and turns coming at least a few pages before they actually do, but that’s okay. Like I said in my summary, this is good light reading for a vacation or a cold rainy day.

It’s not a “must read” (like many other Nebula winners), but you’ll probably enjoy it the way myself and many others have. Just don’t expect much ground-breaking or truly mind-expanding material unless you have yet to read any other science fiction… ever.