Ancient Shores by Jack McDevitt

Ancient Shores
by Jack McDevitt
Pages: 388
Date: 1996
Publisher: HarperCollins
Series: Ancient Shores (1st in series)

Review
Rating: 4.0 out of 5.0
Read: March 27 to 28 2016 (and sometime back in 1996)

I don’t really do re-reads. There are so many stories out there to be read, so much to ingest, to devour. Re-reads, even of past favorites, take time away from that further expansion of the pleasure zone of the mind (I’d have left it to ‘expansion of the mind’, but I read more for pleasure than anything else).

And yet . . . here I am, having finished a re-read of ‘Ancient Shores’. By an author who I kind of stuck onto my ‘favorite’ list then onto my ‘annoyed me’ list (in this authors specific case, the promise inherent in his Academy series never actually got developed, despite the 7 books in the series, and the last one of them was a prequel that I neither liked, nor could fathom why it had been written; similarly, the concept of someone who digs into antiques, from a future perspective, so some of these antiques are from a future between our own time and his, or from our time, or from a time prior to the readers perspective is a very intriguing idea – and the first book promised something that was both slightly delivered and slightly sidetracked – my I kind of hate the lead protagonist in that Alex Benedict series, specifically because it isn’t Alex Benedict).

So, why the reread? Because one of the books I did love written by this author had a sequel. A sequel that appeared somewhere between 9 and 10 years after the first book appeared. It didn’t appear to be a very highly rated sequel, but still, it was there. And I had rather enjoyed Ancient Shores way back in 1996 when I’d read it. Heard to read ‘Thunderbird’ without rereading the book that came before it.

So . . . took me months, but I eventually caved and did a little reread. One thing I learned almost immediately – I had loved this book, the discovery of mysterious objects, the, um, stuff that unfolded . . . and I couldn’t remember a single bloody part of it. No no, I remembered that something got dug up by a famer in the Dakotas. A device that was both mysterious and allowed travel between worlds. But beyond that I didn’t remember anything. No, I take that back, I did remember that the government had to be fought because it acted badly in this book.

There are no real ‘lead characters’, since things hopped around a lot, following a ton of people. But there were at least two that ‘close-ish’ to being the leads – April Cannon and Max something-or-other. I’d remembered the farmer, Tom Lasker, and the kid – his son, who had helped uncover the suspicious thingie that was buried on his land. I did not remember that the kid had no impact on the events. Nor that one of the two leads was a black woman (April), and the other was something of man who lived to run from danger, something of a coward (Max).

McDevitt isn’t always the best with character work, but he did a good job this time around. As much as I kind of grew to dislike Max, he was mostly full-formed. As was April. Heck, one of the problems I had with the book was that he was a little too detailed with minor characters of little importance. Boom – another character, has a very brief scene in the book, then gone. The reader, me, now knows more about that character than they had any desire to know. But bah, that’s life.

It was a good book. Interesting. Certain things that occurred seemed far-fetched ( (1) every bloody scientist was, even if somewhat cautious about things, were accepting of this alien find?; (2) every single bloody scientist could not stop saying stupid fucking things that drove people wild with fear; what the fuck was that about? Was someone actually slipping them money? Every bloody one of them seemed to just live to say (a) the technology is real; (b) it will be easy to reproduce; (c) it will drive every current technology out of existence. I mean, seriously, what the fuck was that about? Even the angry archaeologist who came to scream at them for not having an archaeologist involved seemed quite accepting of the fact that there was alien technology being dug up. So, why were all the scientist so single minded in accepting the findings (unreleatistic, that), while seemingly going out of their way to word things as ‘badly’ as possible – badly in terms of killing the economy?). But despite those occasional moments of far-fetchedness, there was still a good deal of fun and excitement to be found in the book.

Now to see if I’ll actually go ahead and read the sequel. Now that I’ve gone to all this trouble to do a reread.

March 28 2016