Review: Ancient Shores, by Jack McDevitt

Recently I sang the praises of Jack McDevitt’s “Alex Benedict” series, and a reader suggested that I try his earlier novel Ancient Shores. And I did; but I didn’t like it.

I don’t usually write negative reviews; if I dislike it I ignore it. In this case I feel I have to, since it came up in the context of a largely positive review of some of McDevitt’s other book.

Ancient Shores takes place “present day”, when a farmer in North Dakota finds a fully rigged, perfectly preserved sailboat buried in his back forty. I don’t mean an ancient Viking longship; I mean something that would look perfectly at home at the boat dealers down in Long Beach. Well, except for boat’s name, which is written in an alien script, and the boat’s material, which proves to be the counter-intuitively stable and previously undiscovered element 161. It appears to have been buried there for 10,000 years…

One find leads to another, include a teleportation gate to the stars, and it should all be fascinating; but in the event it wasn’t. I was looking for a science fiction romp as the characters explore this strange new world. Unfortunately, Ancient Shores is all about this strange old world, and all of the weird characters (from the White House on down) who come out of the wood work and freak out over the new technology and possibilities of these amazing finds.

It might have been OK if I liked the main characters; but the two main characters are not overly likable. First there’s the farmer’s friend, a guy who restores antique warplanes and is otherwise colorless, diffident, and boring. And second, there’s a scientist—a lab tech, really—who gets involved after she tests the boat’s material and shows it to be a previously unknown element. She’s beautiful (but who isn’t in books like this), ambitious (which is OK) and utterly ruthless at pursuing as much of the credit as she can get for the discoveries, cutting her erstwhile employer completely out of the picture. McDevitt sets up a rather anemic possibility of romance between the two characters, and I swear I kept waiting for her to kiss him and then stab him in the back.

And then there’s the climax, about which the less said the better.

Many years ago, on the old rec.arts.books news group on Usenet, I learned about the Eight Deadly Words: “I Don’t Care About Any Of These People”. And I didn’t; I only finished the book to be sure that it really wasn’t going to get any better.

It may be, judging from some of the idiots we met in passing, that McDevitt intended it as a farce; but if so he didn’t signal it at all well.

Oh, well. Even Jove nods, and anyway he’s not been about much lately.