<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

US writer Jack McDevitt (1935-) began writing in the early 1980s, but with the exception of one novel, The Hercules Text (1986), a straightforward first contact story, wrote only short stories for the next fifteen years. His second novel, A Talent for War (1994), was significantly better, and McDevitt has devoted much of his effort to book length works ever since. Long after a war between humans and aliens has ended, one man sets out to research the hero who was responsible for ending the hostilities, but his research uncovers evidence that virtually everything believed to be known about the man and his accomplishments is false. The novel also introduced "Alex Benedict", an antiquarian whose attitude toward artifacts is a balance between respect and practicality.

Benedict returned for two sequels, Polaris (2004) and Seeker (2005). The first is constructed as a murder mystery. Benedict and his assistant are investigating a mysterious incident in which the entire crew of a starship disappeared leaving no clues as to where they went or why. Their efforts are complicated when someone makes repeated attempts on their life, culminating in an exciting, complex series of chases and a cleverly resolved physical problem, a kind of locked room mystery in space. In somewhat similar fashion, Benedict and his friend track down the location of a lost colony in the third book..

The protagonist of McDevitt's second series is "Priscilla Hutchins", a starship pilot. She was introduced in Deepsix (2001), in which a group of scientists observing the final days of a doomed planet find themselves stranded with only one chance of surviving - activating enigmatic alien artifacts. She returned in Chindi (2002) to investigate mysterious signals originating from outside the known star systems and made her most recent appearance in Omega (2003), this time saving an alien species targeted for extermination by a mysterious phenomenon apparently instigated millennia in the past. Both of McDevitt's series are space operas in structure, but they are elevated above most similar works by the depth of their characterization.

Most of McDevitt's other novels are in the same mode. The Engines of God (1994) also involves a puzzling alien artifact. In Infinity Beach (2000, aka Slow Lightning), another mystery must be solved - an expedition to make first contact with aliens returns, claiming to have failed, but there is reason to believe that they are involved in a conspiracy to conceal the truth. Moonfall (1998) is an atypical disaster novel in which the moon is destroyed by a rogue body, with unpleasant effects on the Earth. McDevitt has proven repeatedly that intelligently written space adventures can be more than just lightweight escape fiction and his work has grown progressively more sophisticated.

External Links

• Jack McDevitt at Internet Movie Database
• SWFA.org - Jack McDevitt