Firebird by Jack McDevitt is the
sixth book in McDevitt's ongoing science fiction series about far
future antiquities dealer Alex Benedict and his
assistant/partner/pilot Chase Kolpath. Ideally, I'd recommend reading
the Alex Benedict series in order (A Talent for War, Polaris,
Seeker, The Devil's Eye, Firebird) but like the other books in
the series Firebird works quite well as a stand-alone book and
should be fairly easy to understand whether you've read its
predecessors or not.
40 years ago on Alex and Chase's home,
the colony world Rimway, the famous and controversial physicist Dr.
Christopher Robin mysteriously vanished from the planet, never to be
seen again. When his widow dies 40 years later, Alex is commissioned
to find buyers for the renowned scientist's personal items. Seeking
information that could help them build interest in the items among
potential buyers, Alex and Chase delve into the history of Dr. Robin,
an enigmatic man whose theories on the existence and nature of
alternate universes made him a figure of intense controversy, shunned
by some and idolized by others, whose mysterious disappearance has
made him the subject of wild speculation ever since.
The trail leads them to encounter two
of Robin's other interests. One is records, some recent and others
going back thousands of years, of unidentified ships appearing near
human worlds and then fading into nothingness a few minutes later.
The other is human interstellar ships that depart on routine
faster-than-light trips and are never seen again, a rare but
troubling phenomenon that has claimed numerous victims throughout
humanity's thousands of years of interstellar travel- including
Gabriel Benedict, Alex's uncle and Chase' former employer. They also
begin to discover clues that Robin was up to something strange in the
final years before his disappearance- and may have been on the verge
of a discovery with implications far beyond the mystery of his own
fate.
Firebird is another solid entry
in the Alex Benedict series. The main story is interesting and goes
in some unexpected directions, and Chase Kolpath is once again an
enjoyable character and first-person narrator. Much of the story is
fairly sedentary and not too far removed from a conventional mystery
story, with Chase and Alex investigating Robin's past by fairly
prosaic means- interviewing people who knew him, searching for
records, visiting places he been- but the mystery is interesting and
made these scenes satisfying for me. It also segues well into the
more specifically science fictional aspects of the story that become
predominant as it progresses. There are also some more fast-paced or
tense bits that work well.
I especially enjoyed the part of the
story where the investigation takes Benedict and Chase to the planet
Villanueva, a formerly populous and advanced world that was cut off
from humanity for centuries by an interstellar dust cloud that
extinguished the human population but left the infrastructure and the
AIs charged with running and maintaining it intact. Left to
themselves, they've continued to do exactly that, keeping
Villanueva's dead cities intact and running for thousands of years-
and making new human settlement impossible by attacking any who land.
It's quite creepy, as Alex and Chase search for clues in clean,
well-maintained, still-powered cities completely devoid of human
life. The way the story deals with the AIs of Villaneuva is
interesting, and leads to some interesting scenes later when Alex
Benedict becomes the center of a political debate on the nature of
AIs and human responsibility for those left behind by the death of
Villaneuva's human population.
McDevitt is good at using rather
mundane elements in ways that complement the science fiction/space
opera aspects of the story- the implications of AI sentience are
argued about on evening talk shows, Villaneuva is dangerous to human
life not because its AIs are either interested in or capable of
attacking humanity but because of the hordes of pro-AI activists and
amateur treasure hunters descending on the planet and getting
themselves killed after it becomes a subject of media attention, and
the search for the truth about Dr. Christopher Robin is at least as
much about old-fashioned investigative skills as it is dangerous
journeys on hostile planets or in deep space. This could be dull if
it were handled poorly, but in Firebird it's effective at
giving the setting a greater feeling of solidity than it would have
had otherwise.
The relatively familiar, recognizable
future presented in the Alex Benedict books has often been the
subject of criticism, for reasons I can appreciate but don't share.
It fits the larger context of the setting, where human interstellar
civilization has undergone multiple dark ages in the time between the
present day and the stories, so thousands of years in the future
doesn't equal thousands of years of technological progress. I also
think the similarity of McDevitt's setting to our own world tends to
be overstated by some people, probably because of what does and
doesn't get attention in the stories. For instance, there are
allusions to the fact that on many human worlds one can simply forgo
employment and live- and apparently live fairly well- on some sort of
government stipend every citizen gets, and that this is not a rare or
stigmatized choice. That implies economic productivity far beyond
what we have now, as well as a profound cultural difference, but the
technological underpinnings of that don't come up because there's no
reason for them to..
A lot of it boils down to one's own
beliefs about the future and the extent to which a setting deviating
from those beliefs impairs your enjoyment of the story. (I'm not of
the “life in the future will necessarily be unrecognizable to us
today” school of thought. It wouldn't surprise me, but I don't
consider it so self-evidently true that the contrary assumption
attacks my suspension of disbelief.) Both of these things vary widely
from individual to individual, so while I like it myself I can
certainly understand why it's a sticking point for some.
I would definitely recommend Firebird
for fans of Jack McDevitt, and for fans of science fiction with a
mystery/investigative bent. If you didn't care for McDevitt style
before it's not going to wow you into changing your mind, but if
you've enjoyed his work in the past it's well worth reading.
