The Engines of God

"Grabbed a book and read the cover
It honestly was beautifully done
Like trying to hide the daylight from the sun"

 

Modest Mouse - Fire It Up

 

 

Having spent much of my fiction reading the past decade on Wells, Heinlein and other duddies of venerable fuddiness, I've been meaning to catch up on more recent (relatively speaking) science fiction. Thus, based on the authors' recommendation below some page or another of A Miracle of Science I picked up Jack McDevitt's The Engines of God, the 1994 opener to what is apparently a rather lengthy series starring the same protagonist. That fixation dampens my further interest, but the first installment was palatable enough.

 

Aside from the necessary phlebotinum of a warp drive, the story sticks to fairly hard science basis. Heroic archaeologists are struggling to discover why a now-extinct alien culture got knocked back to the stone age before a bunch of rich fucks pave over the planet to breed more mindless wage slaves. Also, why would aliens visit our solar system without stopping by to say hello? And most importantly, what species in its right mind would plan construction projects on a boring geometric grid?

 

The core puzzle concerning various alien civilizations works out quite well in fact, slyly teased and corroborated just gradually enough to let the reader keep guessing, and delivers a memorable finale. Problems arise mostly with the stuff in between. It may seem a bit harsh to dredge up Ambrose Bierce's old witticism that such-and-such novel's covers are too far apart, but here we pretty clearly have a shorter novella interspersed with two or three short stories to pad it out to 400 pages to fit the mass market publishing paradigm.

 

As a flaw common to SF writers, characters take awkwardly long to differentiate, and some have little personality beyond filling a set piece like romance subplot or tragic death or disposable redshirt, which gimmicks as we all know all fiction must include on pain of conciseness. A Miracle of Science would actually serve as good counterpoint in looping its apparent digressions back into the main plot, which The Engines of God repeatedly fails to do with its designated comic relief and heroic stand and so forth. To fill the supposedly critical human interest components, an unnecessary proliferation of characters are given an unnecessary quantity of page space, which they by necessity spend engaging in various hijinks in parallel to the main attraction as a way of - supposedly - maintaining readers' interest.

 

But it's those humanizing elements which in fact feel more artificial, included to satisfy a lowest common denominator of social acceptability. The story needed a more tangible, physical conflict for its climax, plus an injection of tragic sacrifice, and it needed exactly 1.35 units of empowered modern heroine who must be supplied with a love interest as per subsection A, paragraph three of the storyteller's chewed cud of conduct, and we simply must have <A WHIMSY> by which to showcase her free spirit.

 

Too bad all that monkey-friendly storytelling is tainted by a legitimately interesting cosmic phenomenon and a well-paced intellectual, exploratory effort to unravel it, or it might have qualified as "literature" instead of lowly genre fiction.