Review of Jack McDevitt's "Deepsix"

««¶¶¶ (review from advance copy)

HarperCollins EOS

One of the cover blurbs proclaims McDevitt "The logical heir to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke." He hasn't quite earned the crown yet.

This is a tale of a doomed world, and the last‑minute archaeological team that gets stranded there. In between dangerous events on the surface and the frantic efforts to save them going on in orbit, McDevitt does a fair job of building a consistent universe background. The main characters are well‑defined (though the rest of the cast gets only short snapshots), and he does a good job of matching their struggles against nature and against unthinking bureaucracy.

The story starts with the discovery of ruins on the surface. The planet will plunge into a gas giant in three weeks, and the only person close enough to handle the exploration in time is a star pilot, on a run back to Earth. It’s an 'alien artifact' novel, and here the native's technology provides the key to the rescue attempt.

But it takes a long time to set up. The first chapter takes place twenty years in the past, and is necessary to explain why the ruins were overlooked for so long. But the heroine doesn't even make it to the planet until chapter four, and they aren't stranded until chapter nine. It's a lot of work, and the payoff should be correspondingly great at the end -- and it is, with a rescue attempt as outlandish and improbable as any ever written. The epilogue is perhaps unnecessary, and may be too sweet for some tastes.

There is one problem ‑‑ it's a minor point, but hard science fiction fans will pounce on it: They use lasers to cut materials and weld metal; archaeological lasers called 'cutters' are the stranded team's only weapons. And it says in several places that they emit white beams. The point is this: there is no such thing as a white laser. You might be able to accept the force-fields that don't protect, the skyhook, and FTL travel that ‘takes too long’ only when the author decides it should. But a laser separates one specific color out of the spectrum of white light. It is coherent light of a specific color and wavelength. It could be red, or green, or any color of the spectrum – but it cannot be white.

A minor error, and one easily fixed by a sharp editor. But if the author actually made a mistake with this fairly basic science, how much of the rest is made up out of this air? Hard science fiction readers want stories grounded in solid facts. So if McDevitt wants to air for Asimov’s height, he'd better get his facts straight first.

‑‑ Scott Micheel