Standard Candles: The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt [Hardcover]

Jack McDevitt (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0964832046 | ISBN-13: 978-0964832046 | Publication Date: August 1996

Sixteen outstanding stories by Hugo and Nebula-award nominee, Jack McDevitt. TABLE OF CONTENTS: Contents: Standard Candles Tidal Effects Translations from the Colosian Black to Move The Fort Moxie Branch Promises to Keep Gus To Hell with the Stars Ellie The Jersey Rifle Cruising Through Deuteronomy Tyger Auld Lang Boom Dutchman Cryptic Time Travelers Never Die BACK COVER: McDevitt's tales have an emotional resonance that lingers well after the book has been set aside. Standard Candles is a strong, strong collection. -Cemetery Dance

Always engaging and insightful, McDevitt can be counted on to ask the deep questions. - David Brin

Jack McDevitt is one of those rare science fiction writers capable of taking the tropes of the field - from war and the military to alien contact to scripture vs. science - and breathing wonderful life into them. He's always a pleasure to read. - Gregory Frost

It's not McDevitt's style, though his prose is wonderfully clear and deceptively simple. It's not his plots, though his stories always ask hard questions, and never settle for easy answers. For me it's his humanity. McDevitt understands the way people talk and think and behave, and still somehow has boundless compassion for the human animal. - Lewis Shiner

In both his novels and his short fiction, Jack McDevitt has shown a terrific range of skills and imagination and speculation. Only one thing remains the same from piece to piece to piece - they're all damn fine stories. - Kevin J. Anderson

Jack McDevitt is a master of the short story form. - Kathleen Ann Goonan

The ideal writer can stretch your mind with a wonderful concept while also touching your heart with a personal story. Most of us fail at one or the other, but from the very beginning of his career Jack McDevitt has shown that he can do both. - Michael Cassutt

You hold in your hand some of the best work of one of our best writers. Enjoy! - James Patrick Kelly

McDevitt is the real thing: a writer with depth, integrating scientific issueswith human concerns on a vast stage, lit by vivid colors. - Gregory Benford

Jack McDevitt is one of the few authors in contemporary science fiction whose work moves faultlessly from scientic speculation to speculations on the nature of reality and the human condition. McDevitt fashions fully realized worlds, rich in imagination, peopled by fully believable characters. More important, you can count on him for a damn fine read. - Bruce Boston

It's high time indeed for a Jack McDevitt story collection! McDevitt writes with wisdom, compassion, and an abiding sense of wonder - everything that has drawn me again and again to the worlds of science fiction - real people with real concerns, in extraordinary settings.If you haven't read this man's work, start now! - Jeffrey A. Carver

Long after you've closed this book,the stories will stay in your mind and in your heart. - Karen Joy Fowler

It has long been a landmark in a science fiction writer's career when a publisher decides it is time to publish a collection of his or her best short fiction. Once upon a time, the publishers who did such things were mass market paperback houses. Today they are largely (not exclusively) small presses that market to the dedicated SF audience. NESFA Press is a good example; it collects work of Boskone guests of honor. So is Tachyon Publications, as it demonstrates with Standard Candles: The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt.

McDevitt has done a number of very interesting novels, of which the last two were The Engines of God and Ancient Shores. The short fiction has been accumulating for years - clever, insightful, often marked by oddly inconclusive endings, and quite neglected in the sense of fame, fortune, and awards. Two of the sixteen stories thus ring of personal revelance: the title story concerns an astronomer who, though he has never flared as brightly as a nova has had a long and glowing career; "The Fort Moxie Branch" offers the notion of a future library that preserves the work of neglected writers and materializes rather like an Isher weapons shop to offer afirmation when a writer needs it most. "Auld Lang Boom" is the butterfly whose wings cause hurricanes - everytime two old friends meet, something awful happens in the world; the surviving heir of one, reading the diary left behind, gets quite spooked. "Cryptic" is the tale of closing down a SETI operation and finding the files of an old computer disk with frightening implications. "Time Travelers Never Die" plays fast and loose with continuity when even after death a time traveler is able to maintain contact with his lover. "The Jersey Rifle" concerns the discovery of the world's greatest chess player, an unassuming druggist who can beat anyone. And more. - Analog

Editorial Reviews

Review

...Here's another writer who both is literary (meaning stylistic, substantive, subtle) and knows his science. He excels at writing about people who do science.... McDevitt also has an eerie ability to make the familiar strange. If his characters mind-warp themselves to another galaxy and find a civilization very much like our own, in which the leading playwright seems to have plagiarized Sophocles, that sounds just silly, doesn't it, like a bad Star Trek episode? We would expect the truly alien on a distant world. McDevitt, far from being lazy, is one of the few writers ever to contemplate how strange and disturbing the discovery of the non-alien would actually be. (He does it again in a story called "Black To Move.") ... Here is an eloquent, challenging writer of short stories, well worth discovering. -- Aboriginal Science Fiction, Winter 1997

From the Publisher

Jack McDevitt may be best known for his novels, but it was with the short story form that he proved his mettle for years inside the pages of the top science fiction magazines. This edition brings together for the first time sixteen of McDevitt's greatest tales. It is here where the full extent of McDevitt's talent is at last on display.McDevitt first rose to prominence with the publication of his short story, "Cryptic," in the April 1983 edition of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. This story of alien contact and war between the stars was widely anthologized and was a Nebula Award finalist. His first novel, The Hercules Text, also dealt with the discovery of an alien race. Published as part of Terry Carr's Ace Science Fiction Specials, the same series that launched the careers of Lucius Shepard, Kim Stanley Robinson, and William Gibson, The Hercules Text won the 1986 Special Philip K. Dick Award.

But it wasn't until his third novel, The Engines of God, that McDevitt emerged as one of science fiction's top novelists. Like Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, The Engines of God concerned itself with the wonders of interstellar anthropology. McDevitt's descriptions of translated fragments of alien writings and his portrayal of alien artwork were wrung with a poetic authenticity that was at once beautiful and mysterious. In Standard Candles, more wonders abound. All are presented with the lucidity and grace that have become McDevitt's trademarks.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 250 pages
• Publisher: Tachyon Pubns (August 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0964832046
• ISBN-13: 978-0964832046
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,182,351 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A science fiction treasure., April 29, 2001

By 

Kenneth D'ambrosio (Merrimack, NH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Standard Candles: The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt (Hardcover)

This is one of those few books that one always hopes to find, but so rarely does. It's kind of odd: I enjoy the novels that McDevitt writes, but the place where he's absolutely incomparable is his short fiction. I'd become turned on to him from Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (stories "Black to Move" among others), which had totally blown me away, as well as the magazine "Chess Life," if you'll believe it. I was somewhat surprised to hear that he did, indeed, have a book of short stories, and was even more surprised to see it had been a fairly small printing. Upon getting it, though, I was not to be disappointed: with the occasional exception (including, oddly enough, the title story), this book is amazing. Easily compares, in my opinion, with the best of Bradbury, Clarke, or Asimov -- people for whom I have tremendous respect. Mr. McDevitt is able to build a truly marvelous universe, and then capture you in it. Not all the stories end happily; few of them even really have much *happen* in them. Instead, they are built by pieces, slowly and methodically put together, to reach a final, frequently stunning conclusion. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would be proud.

If you like science fiction that makes you think, then you need to get this book.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Standard Candles" is thought provoking and faith testing., March 5, 1999

By 

Leslie G. Parish and David C. Parish - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Standard Candles: The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt (Hardcover)

"Standard Candles" is unquestionably a book of short stories that challenges and stimulates the reader's thinking. Each story grips the reader in its character development and plot line. Not all the stories have happy endings, however, there can be only one ending as befits the flow of the action. The stories give the reader another possible explanation to the universe we know. Some also project a belief in a higher being, but not necessarily the strict doctrinal belief with which we are comfortable. This book stretches the imagination, and asks that the reader think three dimensionally about life and the universe. Taut plot lines and sympathetic characters make this a joy to read.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Stunning Achievement, March 22, 2004

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Avid Reader (Franklin, Tn) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Standard Candles: The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt (Hardcover)

Although McDevitt is a wonderful, fine-tuned specialist in long, complex novels for which he has been justly praised, it's almost as if he has surpassed himself in these short stories. The few things I dislike about the novels - the many minor characters or the practice of using "headlines" - are absent here. Instead we have an exuberant celebration of the English language in all its glory.

It is the investigation of the human condition and the events that impact that condition that is the main concern of great writers. And in this case, no one in science fiction comes close to approaching McDevitt's collection. The short story as a literature form has come into its own lately but the quality has lagged behind. Many writers need LOTS of pages and time to develop an idea to its fullest but McDevitt never fails.

It is his shrewd insight into the affairs of mankind, his hints and suggestions, the power of inference, the almost ephemeral nature of his characters's actions. From the very subtle and very understated opening work from which the collection derives its name to the last, it is a series that inspires awe and deep thoughts - an almost perfect case of knowing just the right moment to pause and sometimes stop. Magnificent!!