Seeker – Jack McDevitt (2005)
2005 isn’t history, yet, or so chant all the erstwhile history professors in my brain that I’ve encountered over the years. Where to draw the line between history and current events remains hazy. From one professor I heard 20 years was the absolute minimum distance from event zero. Another professor said that if it happened in your lifetime, it isn’t history. I’m not so sure I buy these theories, particularly the last one (humans have a tendency to live through a lot of big events). But Seeker is only 8 years old and so does probably fall under the purview of the ambiguously dubbed category of “current events.” But that doesn’t mean we can’t attempt to understand Seeker within its own particular pocket of time.
Seeker is an incredibly fast-paced and enjoyable read. It’s not just science fiction but a murder mystery within an archaeological mystery about the discovery of a long lost, Atlantis-like space civilization. The world building, set thousands of years in Earth’s future, is exquisite, and the long pages of expository dialogue and description are intriguing and rarely off-putting. You get the sense right away that this is not a story where any of the main characters will meet an untimely end, even if death stares them in the face, but the tone of the novel is too cheerfully appealing and all the hints of unbelievable perfection that surround our main characters is mostly forgiven. The murder mystery sub-plot seems a bit of an unnecessary drag, as the main plot is enough to propel the novel forward to a satisfying conclusion, but it’s quite obvious that McDevitt loves mysteries jut as much as he loves hard sci-fi.
The central mystery of Seeker revolves around the eponymous ship, an interstellar Earth vessel that went out into the stars 9000 years ago to found a utopia and promptly disappeared. It, and the so-named settlers, the Margolians, have become a myth, but when evidence of the Seeker turns up at the door of Alex Benedict, independent archaeologist extraordinaire, the find sparks the imagination of him and Chase Kolpath, Bendict’s assistant and the narrator of the the novel. They are hellbent on finding the Seeker and the Margolians who crewed her, whether they are dead or alive. Margolia and her occupants represent a coup d’etat for Benedict if he can find them.
I don’t want to give away too much about what happens because a lot of the fun of this book is watching the story unfold. I will say that it’s pretty obvious how things are going to end up, but taking each step toward the ending in turn is highly satisfying. I don’t like mysteries, but McDevitt’s deft inclusion of science fiction elements, including the search for a lost world and interactions with an alien race, kept me rapt almost till the end. Usually I do a lot of skimming in these books, but here I didn’t want to miss a detail. The only plot that seemed laborious to me was, as I mentioned the murder plot. There I admit letting my attention wander.
To attempt putting this book in its historical place, we must examine the Margolians themselves. They are a bunch of intellects who leave Earth to start a society based on freedom of thought. My only point of comparison is the anti-intellectualism that emerged under the Bush years, which could make the Margolians and their dream an inspiration for the material, be it conscious or not. The world Chase and Alex live in is devoid of war at a time when the United States was involved in two highly contested wars abroad. In Seeker, every society, be they alien or human, has gone through periods of intraspecies war and then found peace again, which is perhaps McDevitt’s hope for present day mankind.
Whatever the comparison, Seeker is a great read. Historians especially should enjoy this quest for a long lost civilization. McDevitt even manages to write an incredibly smart female protagonist without objectifying her too much. He gets extra points for that as well.
