Book: Seeker by Jack McDevitt


Fun space-opera

Jack McDevitt
Seeker
Ace, 2005
ISBN: 0-441-01329-5
$24.95
360 pages

Seeker is good old-fashioned space opera. It's about Chase Kolpath (the book's narrator) and Alex Benedict, the employees of Rainbow, a firm that deals in antiquities. Alex is the boss and Chase is the pilot of their spaceship, the Belle-Marie. They need a spaceship and a pilot because they often go and find their antiquities themselves. Naturally, academic archeologists disapprove.

At the start of the book, someone brings a plastic cup into their office. It turns out to be about 9,000 years old (from around the year 2600 as we earthlings reckon years) and so very valuable. Intriguingly, it bears the name (in an ancient script called English) of a spaceship that took colonists to a colony world that no one has heard from since. Of course, that sets Chase and Alex on an interesting search through space and old archives.

The book's pacing is a bit uneven. There are sections in the middle that amble, though they do not drag, and a lot of stuff comes quickly at the end. But the story is good fun and the ending is satisfying. Seeker is excellent lightweight fun.


There are a couple of tiny errors: ABS plastic is not a ceramic (pp. 27, 28, 31) and "world's" would be better as "galaxy's" on page 62.

Posted: Wed - December 20, 2006 at 06:41 PM   Main   Category: 

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