Thunderbird

I'm a long time fan of Jack McDevitt's. I've been reading his work since his first novel, The Hercules Text back in the late 80's. I just finished Thunderbird, a recent work, and I was sincerely disappointed.

This novel is a followup to his novel, Ancient Shores, which was published in 1996. I quite enjoyed Ancient Shores, a combination of xenoarcheology mystery story and thriller, pitting scientists up against the overwhelming odds of the federal government, with science winning the day.

Thunderbird does not live up the the legacy of its predecessor. While the pacing in Ancient Shores was a race down an ever-steepening hill till you finally reached the bottom, the pacing in Thunderbird was uniformly flat. It was never really boring, but it never really got exciting. Instead of a pace that increased the closer you got to the climax of the story, it was a story that moved steadily forward at a constant pace. Because I was reading it via my iPad, I didn't even realize I was getting close to the end of the book until I looked down and realized I had less than twenty pages to go. This was disappointing because one thing I came to love about McDevitt's writing in the 90's and early 2000's was his mastery of pacing.

On top of that, the ending was perplexing, disappointing, and abrupt. Here there be spoilers: The book takes us to so many interesting places, and introduces us to many, many enigmas. We meet three different alien races, start building relationships with one of them to the point where we were exchanging books and cultural artifacts, find alien worlds, and even a future version of Earth. All of these situations hold the promise of interesting discoveries and conflict, and we just barely start scratching the surface of many of them. And then, out of the blue, Chairman Walker decides to pull out the metaphorical spark plugs and dump them into the depths of Lake Michigan. No discussion, no desperate pitch to save the day, and absolutely no closure for any of the intriguing possibilities that had been brought up. It made no sense to end the book this abruptly, and with so little sense of drama. I get that the chairman was scared out of his wits, but and this was an easy way to end the book, but it really didn't give me much satisfaction.

This is the third book of McDevitt's recent releases that I've been rather disappointed by. I hope that this is a temporary lull in the author's skill in writing exciting, engaging, and satisfying books, and that in the near future, I'll look forward to his name appearing on the shelf on a new work. But with the current trend, I'll probably be a lot less inclined to pick up his next novel.