Customer Reviews

Echo (Alex Benedict)

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Just two months ago, I had never heard of Jack McDevitt. I was browsing in a bookstore and came across a title which caught my eye -- "A Talent For War", the first of the Alex Benedict novels. It was both a science fiction and a detective novel, and the basic premise really intrigued me.

I picked up all four of the Benedict books and plowed through them, and then read the six Priscilla Hutchins novels for good measure. I am thoroughly hooked on the works of this author. A couple of his standalone works are also top notch.

Alex Benedict is an antiquity dealer who, along with his assistant Chase Kolpath, lives some eight thousand years in the future on a planet called Rimway. With faster-than-light travel a routine matter, and a wealth of planets (including Earth) harboring the ruins of countless ancient human civilizations, there is no shortage of artifacts and memorabilia to buy and sell.

Every now and again, Alex comes across something mysterious which really captures his imagination, and he focuses an intense amount of his, and Chase's, time and energy into pursuing it. It's not about the money, it's more the thrill of the chase, the thirst for knowledge. The pair begin to receive death threats and even become the targets of diabolically clever assassination attempts. While Chase has reservations about the sanity of continuing the quest, Alex is undeterred. After all, if someone is willing to kill to keep a secret, it must be really, really big. The kind of stuff that can rewrite history books or even save huge numbers of lives.

Since all but the first book are narrated in first person by Chase, we can assume that she's going to survive to write about it, but we never know about Alex.

So, when "Echo" came out, I was very eager to dig in. In a brief prologue, we are introduced to two key individuals. The first is Somerset Tuttle, a maverick scientist who has devoted his whole life to finding an alien civilization. True, there is a telepathic race known as the Ashiyyur, nicknamed the Mutes. But they're old hat -- people want to find OTHER aliens. And yet, Tuttle has become the butt of jokes. Real scientists know the galaxy is empty. There are planets with life, but no intelligent life. "Found any little green men yet?" is a common question or maybe taunt hurled at Tuttle.

The second person we meet in the prologue is Rachel Bannister, a spaceship pilot for World's End Tours. She is very upset about something she saw out there, something terrible. But we won't find out what for the rest of the book. It's a bit of a surprise, nothing I would have guessed.

Chapter One picks up 28 years after the prologue. Tuttle has died and Rachel is no longer piloting. Alex and Chase are invited to pick up a peculiar stone tablet from Tuttle's old home. It's been sitting out in the yard, and the new owner doesn't want it. Alex is intrigued by the pictures because of its mysterious writing. It matches nothing known to humanity, and is unlikely to match anything Ashiyyur either.

But, before Alex can examine the stone, Rachel Bannister's relatives snatch it up and proceed to lead Chase and Alex on a merry, but fruitless hunt. Soon, the first assassination attempt takes place. True to form, Alex knows he's on to something big, and won't quit.

The burning question: Did Tuttle find an alien civilization? His old friends think the idea is preposterous. He would have shouted his discovery from the rooftops to prove his ridiculers wrong. But whatever he found, people are willing to kill to cover it up. Rachel clearly knows something, but won't say what.

Soon, both Chase and Rachel will be pushed to the breaking point as the pressure mounts, and the news media begin to have a field day.

I enjoyed "Echo" as much as its predecessors in the series, but noticed an interesting development. The other series, featuring Priscilla Hutchins, is set in the relatively near future, on Earth and nearby star systems. McDevitt extrapolates current environmental and political developments to their logical conclusion, and humanity's prospects look dismal indeed. People are beginning to give up space travel and are looking inward, and history shows that civilizations tend not to survive once they lose a crucial amount of dynamism.

The Benedict novels, in contrast, are so far in the future that they're completely detached from 21st century Earth's affairs. Human interstellar civilization has gone through two major dark ages, but things are currently pretty vibrant.

At least, they were for the first four books of the series. With "Echo", a certain malaise is starting to creep in, just like the Hutchins books. People are more interested in experiencing the universe virtually than in taking an actual star voyage. Hardly anyone goes exploring any more. What's the point, they ask. People are getting too soft and comfortable.

It will be interesting to see what happens with any future books. I'm hoping a certain amount of optimism remains.

What I really enjoy about McDevitt's writing is his matter-of-fact approach to the technological marvels surrounding the characters. When someone asks how antigravity works, Chase replies: "Push a button, and you lift off." The books don't get bogged down with technobabble.

McDevitt drops you, the reader, right into the local culture, with plenty of offhand remarks about popular writers, singers, restaurants and sports games. He mentions exotic (to us) pets in a casual way, and we get some idea that they're dog- or cat-like from general descriptions.

It looks like the Hutchins series has ended, but I'm certainly hoping there will be a few more Benedict books before McDevitt hangs up his quill.

Echo has a very intriguing opening and kept the momentum going till around 2/3 of the way. I was hooked for quite a while with curiosity building up intensely as the fantastic sci-fi/detective storyline evolved.

But toward the end when you start to see the end of the tunnel, you begin to realize that the author pretty much gave up on being epic scifi and focused solely on a mediocre detective path - with several rigidly placed events and astoundingly dimwitted decisions by many characters.

And for a minor annoyance, I have to agree with the other reviews on the author's way of introducing minor or major characters by starting with "He/she looks good", or how their hair/skin/eyes/smile looked nice, or that they are old but they still look good. They are all the exact wording, which give you the same kind of feeling as when you are playing a video game whose characters look exactly the same with a handful of outfit to switch around to give you the illusion of diversity.

Despite the complaints I still liked most of the book and although the ending was in a hurry but it's acceptable nonetheless. Maybe the next Benedict series will elaborate more on the ending.

Not sure if this series has been going on a little to long, perhaps it has. However I found myself yawning a little as I ended this book. I'm a big fan of the Alex Benedict series on the whole having read the excellent A Talent For War many years ago, however I am finding them very predictable now. Alex, would have to be the luckiest guy around, nothing bad really ever happens to him and at the end of the day he always wins out.

Echo follows the usual path of Alex and Chase on the trail of an possible alien civilisation. In truth however Chase is once again the main character with Alex simply in the background a great deal of the time, this is kind of strange as the series is named after him?. I won't spoil the story but to be honest I found the whole thing kind of lame, hopefully the next enstalement, firebird will put some fire back into this series that has sadly become pretty pedestrian.

In Echo, an antiques dealer, Chase and his girl Friday, Alex, try to determine whether a mysteriously inscribed tablet represents the first evidence ever of an alien race after nine thousand years of space exploration by mankind.

The novel is really more of a detective story than a sci-fi story - a poorly written detective story. The tablet belongs to a thirty year dead space explorer named Tuttle. Before Chase and Alex can get their hands on it the table disappears.

In hard cover this is a three hundred and seventy page book. For three hundred of those pages McDeivitt delights us with encounter after encounter of people who may know where the tablet is or what it means, but they never do. The great majority of these people do nothing to move the plot along, are about as deep as "Hardy Boys" characters and serve mainly as filler to get the book up to novel length. More witty remarks about this below.

Oddly, even though the novel takes place nine thousand years hence, except for flying cars, AI's and interstellar travel, nothing has changed. People still eat "pot roast sandwiches" and live in condo's and cabins. It is as if McDevitt makes no attempt to create a future world. "It's the year 11,351 so pull up a chair, have a beer and watch the game."

My mother use to make meatloaf a lot when we were kids. We didn't have a lot of money so the meatloaf was usually more bread than meat. This book is a lot like that meatloaf. But unlike this book, my mother's meatloaf, God rest her soul, was good. Jack McDevitt's Echo, not so much. There is not enough real material in this book to make a short novella. Shame on you Ace Books for publishing this. There are lots of young, gifted writers out there that are so much more deserving to be published but are never seen because a publishers like Ace will go with a known author, even if his work is horrible, than someone who is truly deserving. Jack McDevitt has written some of the best SF in the last 25 years - I hope and trust he can get back to form.

It's true that most books are autobiographical to some degree. In McDevitt's case, his futures reflect his own times. Thus, 8,000 years from now we will still have trains, churches and synagogues, bingo and morning coffee. We'll try out new restaurants and haunt bars before tuning in to our favorite show on TV. Oh yes, we will also hop onto a ship and proceed at faster-than-light speed to other worlds.

It is this familiarity - though hilariously miscast - that makes for appealing stories. But alas, Alex and Chase have become predictable: An interesting old artifact appears, they investigate, get threatened, talk to lots of folks then take off into space and find the answer on an unknown world. In this case, the alien idea was utterly absurd - nearly identical "humans" developed on another world but for some reason they had 42 chromosomes - lol. These folks also possessed empathy, a shared psychology, goals, and emotions as well as religion, schools, etc. In other words, their development matched ours to a "T".

The plot was inventive and the "secret" creatively revealed early in the story. Jack is at his best writing descriptions of ideas and things instead of people and their interactions. Future folks still seem like residents of Mayberry, USA -very surface, cartoon-like every men and women that we see today. Romances are almost antiseptic in squeaky cleanliness and rarely does someone raise their voice. Chase and Alex continue their platonic association without a hint of hankypanky. I will most likely buy the next one but I did prefer the grandeur of the OMEGA novels. My grade: C

I am a very big fan of McDevitt and have read each and every one of his books. One of the themes that I enjoy most about McDevitt books is "Are we all alone?" This book moves along at a fairly good clip through 3/4 of the book. It was a real page turner, driven my a mysterious object that our heroes, Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath, are trying to find its origins. Where did it come from? How old is it? What do the symbols mean? What follows is a series of clues that are followed and the reader is invited to come along for the ride as our protagonists attempt to find answers to these questions. We've seen Alex/Chase in previous McDevitt novels and they're pretty much the same characters here. But that's good as we're familiar with them and how they attempt to solve problems. The last quarter of the book is a bit of a let down after, what I thought, was a really good start. I cannot write exactly what my problem was with the end of the book without giving away the whole story. Suffice to say that it was sufficient to move it from a 5-star rating to a 4-star rating. It really was good, a page-turner, just not great.

Jack's books are getting a bit predictable and formulaic, and there is no mind-bending, shock and awe factor in this book or any of his recent books that I've read (Seeker and Chindi are slight exceptions). In this book, the writing itself is always good and entertaining, and it's been fun getting to know the Alex and Chase characters (reminds me a bit of Mulder and Scully from the X-Files). However, this book was ultimately a let down. The ending made no sense at all and felt carelessly thrown together. The aliens were actually humans (or human-looking), yet who was making that strange alien sounds from the satellite around the other deserted planet where they found the building? Why would the assassin project an alien holographic form in the house that blew up? Then there is basically one sentence in the Epilogue given over to the source of the "tablet", which the WHOLE book revolved around??? Come on. It was totally convoluted. Why can't good authors get their endings right?! You make us read almost the whole book for nothing. It's like expecting a good dessert at the end of your fancy, high-priced meal, and instead getting a lump of sour yogurt. Oh well, at least I didn't pay for this book.

I thought I loved this book until I read the other reviews then I began to doubt myself!

Actually, I sped through this book in 2 days; I really couldn't put it down.

What I would like to ask Jack McDevitt is this: "Why do the people in this book know about Galileo and Hitler yet have so many "lost" civilizations (from 2 - 3,000 years ago) they know NOTHING about?" I guess there's just no telling what information gets passed onto future generations....

I've read reviews where people wonder about the Alex/Chase team because what does Chase do? This finally caught up to me, too. Chase is kind of a bumbler. She does very little for the business, has a minimal personal life, and usually finds a way to stumble into trouble or mess up a difficult situations. All she does is "pilot superluminals." In this book she admits that she doesn't know how it works, and piloting means pushing a button. Is she there because an Alex-only team won't work either. Usually Alex is the brains of the operation and has it all figured out by the last act. This time he plays the bumbler, too. Note the contrived "I must save this painting" at the end that is totally out of character but is necessary in order to set up the last quarter of the book, including the dramatic final confrontation. If this series has reached the point of out-of-character contrivances to work, it's time to put it to bed.

I like Jack's books. I really do. He's one of my favorite authors.
Echo however, seems to fall a little bit short of his previous work. It seems to go slow for most of the book, then jumps to warp speed and the ending cranks through too fast.

If this was his standard of writing, I'd still read him, but some of his other stuff is so much better.