Peter Hodges

For some reason, I’ve missed most of McDevitt’s fiction during my tenure as a science fiction reader. I first read some of his short stories in the anthology Breach the Hull, which Mike McPhail of MilSciFi.com provided for my review. I enjoyed his prose immensely, so I decided to see what he had recently written.

I settled on Polaris as my first choice. The book cover is splashed with a blurb that indicates that McDevitt is the “heir to Asimov and Clarke.” Given how much of my formative youth was spent with my nose in their books, I thought this was an auspicious beginning.

Polaris is the story of Alex Benedict and his “assistant” Chase Kolpath, antiquities dealers. In a far future star-spanning civilization, they find and sell cultural relics from the past (past meaning way after our own time) to rich clients. They fill a niche with rich clients that like to have artifacts to show off to their friends or families. They become interested in the sixty year old disappearance of six celebrities from a ship called the Polaris, which was present to watch the collision of a neutron star with a G-type star that supported planets. Shortly after watching the collision, the crew on this ship mysteriously disappears.

When the government opens up an auction of the personal effects from those on the Polaris, Alex and Chase manage to buy several artifacts for their clients. In the process of touring the facility where the items are stored, a bomb, attributed to a local terrorist group destroys the building. It is no stretch of the imagination to note that the bomb was aimed not at the people attending the tour, but rather at keeping the secret of the Polaris disappearances intact.

What follows is a fairly typical whodunit in the Asimov style. I won’t lie and say that I was surprised at the ending. McDevitt is perhaps a little too obvious in the way he provides clues to the reader, but the characters are genuninely likable and the story moves along at a brisk enough pace that I was mostly satisfied at the conclusion. I would say that this novel would qualify as a good beach read.