2013 SF, seventh in the Academy series and a prequel. Priscilla
Hutchins is just completing interstellar pilot training, but already
demand for pilots is dropping. And terrorists are threatening the
terraforming project. Spoilers.
McDevitt's tended, in recent books in this series, to put in
heavy-handed parallels to present-day concerns. Here he's got an
assumed viewpoint that being in space is Good and anyone opposed to
that is therefore Bad; it's a view with which I have some sympathy,
but no argument looks good when all the good guys are on one side and
the other is stock nasties.
There's also a company that's going ahead with a terraforming project
even at the risk of wiping out all the target world's native life,
opposed by evil terrorists who are setting off bombs and otherwise
attacking space infrastructure. (We never meet an opponent of
terraforming who isn't a terrorist.)
Characters are fairly simple, as usual for McDevitt. This has been
less of a problem in books in which more stuff happened. But what we
have here is mostly routine for him by now, a couple of emergency
situations (including a Cold Equations-style setup so blatant I was
almost surprised that story didn't get a name-check, which completely
fails to consider several of the possible solutions apparently because
the plot needs it to go a particular way), some big talk, and, well,
that's it. We know the big promises of alien contact aren't going to
come to anything, because we've read the other Academy books. There
are small bonuses for fans of the series, like Hutchins getting the
nickname by which she's universally known in later books, but that's
about it. A romantic subplot feels adolescent, isn't really consistent
with the Hutchins we know from later books, and trails off without any
resolution.
This felt like storytelling by the numbers: erect a plot framework,
insert characters, spackle with tech. McDevitt has written much better
than this (my particular favourite is A Talent for War but the first
four or so books of this series were also much more to my taste).
Strictly for the completist. Given how much he's gone downhill in the
last few years, unless I hear really positive reviews from somewhere
else, this is likely to be the last new McDevitt I read.
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