Jack McDermit's The Engines of God.
Softback. £5.99. Publisher Voyager

If I had not read any of JacK McDevit's books before, I would not have touched this book. The reason for this is the one line blurb on the front - "Classic Sense of Wonder SF meets the X Files" - yuk! The sense-of-wonder bit is ok, but I don't want any "truth is out there" nonesense thank you.

However, knowing that his previous stuff was relatively "hard" sf persuaded me to hope that the publishers were simply trying to grab some market, and thankfully this was the case.

The set up is not entirely original. The "Monument Makers" are a long vanished race who left stuff scattered around our corner of the galaxy, and in the early 23rd century the archaelogists at various locations are trying to put the local galactic history together.

The innovative part is that these remains are really just that, lumps of inanimate art, rather than the more common scenario of long dead spaceships with wonder drives or teleporting abilities. This means that the humans are trying to piece together alien history, not alien technology.

The book is split into four parts, the first three being centred around different archaelogical locations, the final being the inevitable answering session. This structure does make for some uneven pacing, but apart from an annoying habit of inserting news-headlines from Earth, the book was on the whole quite well structured, and never really hit any doldrums.

Whether I liked the answers at the end or not, I am still unsure. There is a major flaw in the logic which leads to the final discovery, but I will leave it to the reader to notice it.

All in all, a relatively easy book to read, with enough high octane page turning sections to mean that the 400+ pages dissapeared within two days.


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