Metaphorosis Reviews
Written on Nov 8, 2023
Summary
The age of interstellar ships is waning as humanity draws inward. But an odd discovery that suggests advanced alien life puts Priscilla Hutchins back in charge of an expedition to explore.
Review
Several McDevitt covers (including this one) have trumpeted a quote from Stephen King: “The logical heir to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke!” And McDevitt’s books have generally featured character-based stories with ‘firm’ SF. Here, though, he gives up on that second aspect almost entirely. I’ve been a fan of McDevitt’s Academy series since it started 30 years ago (though my TBR pile is so large that I’m only now getting around to this book). I was sorry to see how completely he’s dropped the ball.
The characters are still strong, though this series is getting harder to distinguish from the Alex Benedict series. But here McDevitt makes virtually no effort at credibility. It’s already established that some aliens in the universe are roughly humanoid. Here (spoiler), they virtually all are – in size, habit, diet, nature, civilization, genetics etc. McDevitt not only falls into the common fallacy that alien life must have pretty much the same set of conditions as ours, but assumes – with no basis – that they’ll be just like us. For example, that their genetics must be pretty similar to DNA – as if there’s no other way to organize complex information. That alien food – while perhaps not nutritious – won’t do humans any harm, as if there are no toxic compounds in the universe. That if some aliens are large and some are small, the large ones must be male – and that aliens will have similar gender roles to humans (e.g., that the women will want to be complimented on their clothing). Even alien rotary telephones are basically the same as human ones – other than color, they’re apparently indistinguishable.
The humans in the story are remarkably incurious. They find alien structures, and are in no way surprised that buildings have human dimensions. They run across amazing finds, and their reaction is largely, “eh”. They take no samples. Their vehicles are very poorly designed (in order to allow for the crisis in the story). Their main thought seems not to be science, but (like Alex Benedict) selling stuff. They all appear to expect a compatriot to almost immediately give up on a rescue, though there’s apparently nothing else he’s doing. They let aliens come up with an elaborate communication scheme rather than making any real effort of their own. On the other hand, when aliens need help, the humans come up with a plan and set it in motion with barely any attempt to include the aliens or let them make any decisions.
And, at one point, a character says, “I suspect there wouldn’t have been enough space for giant lizards on a world that is mostly ocean.” As if Earth weren’t mostly ocean or had never had giant lizards.
I’ve enjoyed McDevitt in the past, but I have to admit that the allure has waned substantially. The Alex Benedict series has been thin and repetitive for quite some time, and I found this book to be fundamentally lazy. I’m going to have to shift McDevitt from ‘automatic purchase’ to ‘maybe’.
