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lonemagpiePOLARIS by Jack McDevitt
Took a while for various reasons. It’s a fun bit of SF, and a good detective mystery set thousands of years in the future, with a personable narrator and a colourful set of worlds and locations, and generally realistic science with the obvious exception of a vague McGuffin drive to allow for FTL travel. It feels like a jet-setting mystery thriller, and is just that, except on a bigger scale, being world-hopping.
It’s filled with examples of that Trek trope of references to fictional otherworld celebrities and whatnot, which are to give local colour rather than continuity to other books. This works well to start with but just goes on so often that I swear you could cut about a hundred pages just by removing them. Padding of people biting, chewing, and swallowing their sandwiches is also OTT and reminds me of one time somebody parodied my DW stuff by such a paragraph- except that I never wen this far or frequent with it. I don’t remember this level of these irrelevances in other McDevitt books I’ve read (such as Eternity Road and Chindi) so either they had the right amount and this one was one too many, or the fact that it’s part of a series about a future antiquities dealer means there’s more of it. Very non-diverse too, which is kind of odd for something with so many characters flitting past through such a wide cosmos.
Still, it was fun, solid mystery and solution, some exciting bits, and really just needed some trimming on those fronts.
Took a while for various reasons. It’s a fun bit of SF, and a good detective mystery set thousands of years in the future, with a personable narrator and a colourful set of worlds and locations, and generally realistic science with the obvious exception of a vague McGuffin drive to allow for FTL travel. It feels like a jet-setting mystery thriller, and is just that, except on a bigger scale, being world-hopping.
It’s filled with examples of that Trek trope of references to fictional otherworld celebrities and whatnot, which are to give local colour rather than continuity to other books. This works well to start with but just goes on so often that I swear you could cut about a hundred pages just by removing them. Padding of people biting, chewing, and swallowing their sandwiches is also OTT and reminds me of one time somebody parodied my DW stuff by such a paragraph- except that I never wen this far or frequent with it. I don’t remember this level of these irrelevances in other McDevitt books I’ve read (such as Eternity Road and Chindi) so either they had the right amount and this one was one too many, or the fact that it’s part of a series about a future antiquities dealer means there’s more of it. Very non-diverse too, which is kind of odd for something with so many characters flitting past through such a wide cosmos.
Still, it was fun, solid mystery and solution, some exciting bits, and really just needed some trimming on those fronts.