REVIEW: Jack McDevitt's Priscilla Hutchins series

When I find a new author whose work I want to read I often read everything in that person's oeuvre, or at least the entire series in the books that I have been pointed to. Due to his appearance multiple times in the list of nominees for the Nebula award and the Hugo award, Jack McDevitt was added to my "To Be Read" list.

After doing some research on the web (Wikipedia!), it appeared as if his Priscilla Hutchins and his Alex Benedict series are the most well-known and well-regarded by critics and fans alike. Both of these series cover the topic of "xenoarcheology" or the study of ancient alien remains. Obviously, since we haven't discovered any aliens in our timeline, McDevitt sets his books in the far (and near) future where mankind has the ability to travel interstellar space relatively easily and discovers that alien civilizations have prospered and disappeared  from other locales in the Universe, leaving behind an interesting archeological record. In the Alex Benedict series, the archeology is really about unearthing the past history of humanity, and those books are thousands of years in the future where Earth is acknowledged as the first planet man developed, but the central planet of humanity is called Rimway, and the history of most of what happened on Earth is almost entirely forgotten or myth. In the Priscilla Hutchins, the time period is only about two hundred years away from present history so the story revolves around finding alien artifacts on the limited number of planets that human technology at the time allows them to access. The two series are similar in their focus on looking backwards at the past, but occur in very different technological and sociological milieu, and are centered around  very different main characters.

In this blog post I will review the books in the Priscilla Hutchins series, which I think is the stronger of the two series overall, though it is not clear if McDevitt himself agrees with this assessment, since he has not written a new book in that series since 2007, the year after he won his only Nebula award for an installment in the Alex Benedict series (2006's Seeker) while the 2011 installment, Firebird, was also nominated for a Nebula. Overall, four of the six books in each series have been nominated for the award, which is pretty impressive.

Interestingly, my first interaction with the Priscilla Hutchins was not a very good one. I started reading the first book, The Engines of God, but I could not connect with the characters at all. After finishing the first chapter I realized I was basically uninterested in the story and returned the book to the library. I continued reading (and enjoying) the books in the other McDevitt series based around the activities of Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath.

A few weeks later I tried borrowing the second book in the Priscilla Hutchins series, Deepsix, and strangely, I could not put it down. It is very suspenseful, and for some reason I almost instantly identified with the Hutchins character. There are some important developments from the first book which are referred to in all of the subsequent books but I was still able to enjoy all of the books despite reading them in order 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 then 1. The curious part of reading them slightly out of order is that The Engines of God (Book 1) ended up being my favorite book of the series, closely followed by Deepsix (Book 2), then Chindi (Book 3), Omega (Book 4), Odyssey (Book 5) and Cauldron (Book 6).

Really, the first three books are all uniformly excellent, with the fourth book being quite good while the last two are somewhat disappointing. This may be another reason for why McDevitt appears to have stopped writing the books in this series. That being said, I still would recommend reading the entire series, because a central mystery introduced in Book 1 is answered in Book 6, even though I found the answer itself is a bit odd and unsatisfying.

Hutchins is a great character, and an anomaly in most speculative fiction, since she is a woman of color in a genre primarily created and consumed by white men. McDevitt does a uniformly strong job of writing his novels and every single book has a very suspenseful plot and describe an interesting and potentially possible future.

Title: The Engines of God.

Author: Jack McDevitt .

Length: 432 pages.

Publisher: Ace.

Published: December 1, 1995.
Read: September 2012.

OVERALL GRADE: A (4.0/4.0).

PLOT: A+.

IMAGERY: A.

IMPACT: A. 

WRITING: A-.

Title:  Deepsix.

Author: Jack McDevitt .

Length: 528 pages.

Publisher: Harper Voyager.

Published: January 8, 2002.
Read: July 2012.

OVERALL GRADE: A (4.00/4.0).

PLOT: A.

IMAGERY: A.

IMPACT: A+. 

WRITING: A-.

Title:  Chindi.

Author: Jack McDevitt .

Length: 528 pages.

Publisher: Ace.

Published: October 28, 2003.
Read: August 2012.

OVERALL GRADE: A/A- (3.83/4.0).

PLOT: A.

IMAGERY: A-.

IMPACT: A. 

WRITING: A-.

Title:  Omega.

Author: Jack McDevitt .

Length: 512 pages.

Publisher: Ace.

Published: October 26, 2004.
Read: August 2012.

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.66/4.0).

PLOT: A-.

IMAGERY: A-.

IMPACT: A-. 

WRITING: A-.

Title:  Odyssey.

Author: Jack McDevitt .

Length: 432 pages.

Publisher: Ace.

Published: October 30, 2007.
Read: September 2012.

OVERALL GRADE: B+/A- (3.5/4.0).

PLOT: B+.

IMAGERY: B+.

IMPACT: A-. 

WRITING: A-.

Title:  Cauldron.

Author: Jack McDevitt .

Length: 432 pages.

Publisher: Ace.

Published: October 28, 2008.
Read: September 2012.

OVERALL GRADE: B/B+ (3.16/4.0).

PLOT: B-.

IMAGERY: B.

IMPACT: B+. 

WRITING: A-.