A Voice in the Night
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Jack McDevitt has been a Sherlock Holmes fan since he was a teenager, although he reports that Holmes-style mysteries, whodunits, are not his favorite style. Jack encountered Gilbert Chesterton’s Father Brown tales a few years later and they ultimately became the prime influence in his science fiction. The issue with Father Brown was never a question of who committed the murder, but rather what in heaven’s name is going on here?
Why does an astronaut, in “Cathedral,” sacrifice her life to collide with an asteroid that she knows poses no threat to the Earth? Why does a scientist who’s designed an actual working AI in “The Play’s the Thing,” hide what’s he’s done? How is it that the lives of two people working at Moonbase in “Blinker” depend on a quasar?
In “Lucy,” Jack shows us why sending automated vehicles to explore the distant outposts of the solar system may not be a good idea. And in “Searching for Oz,” an alternate history story, how things might have been if SETI had gotten what it was looking for. He describes our reaction in “Listen Up, Nitwits,” when a voice begins speaking to us, apparently from Jupiter, in Greek. And in “The Lost Equation,” a Holmes adventure, we discover who really was first to arrive at e=mc2.
Jack also provides two episodes, “Maiden Voyage” and “Waiting At the Altar,” from Priscilla Hutchins’ qualification flight; and an effort by a sixteen-year-old Alex Benedict, in the title story with his uncle Gabe and Chase Kolpath’s mom, Tori, who are trying to understand why a brilliant radio entertainer, lost in the stars when his drive unit suffered a malfunction, never said goodbye.
These and fourteen other rides into odd places await the reader.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fans of classic science fiction will enjoy this collection of 24 short stories that cover familiar genre themes such as the search for alien life and the implications of time travel in plain but effective prose. McDevitt, best known for his Alex Benedict and Priscilla Hutchins series (both represented by entries here), excels at conjuring an alternate world, even within the confines of the short story format. For example, "Maiden Voyage" a prequel to 2013's Starhawk that depicts Hutchins's qualification flight en route to her goal of attaining a pilot's license instantly immerses the reader in a future where space exploration has been revived after the discovery of huge monuments that evidence nonhuman intelligence. Not every entry is memorable; "Friends in High Places," in which the Greeks rule Judea at the time of Christ, is underdeveloped, and the Twilight Zone twists of some stories are less than thought-provoking. Overall, however, this is a solid collection that will engage readers who have not previously encountered McDevitt's work.