I Got Trolled by Jack McDevitt

Ok, now that I've explored a little bit about the depiction of aliens in sci-fi, I can talk about what got me ranting in the first place. For a little while now I've been a sporadic fan of Jack Mcdevitt's Alex Benedict series. They're not the best books I've ever read, but they're fun and easy to read, so I got through a few of them very quickly and actually enjoyed them despite the formulaic plots and underdeveloped characters. What I liked most was McDevitt's incredibly nuanced and refreshingly novel treatment of aliens. That is, until I read Echo.

Let me back up and summarize the series briefly. Humanity has been in space for thousands of years and has settled numerous planets. Civilizations have risen and fallen all over the place, leaving behind tons of artifacts, from abandoned colonies and space stations to personal diaries and commemorative plates (LOTS of commemorative plates; I wonder how infomercials work in the future). Alex Benedict is a wealthy antiquities dealer/amateur archeologist who, along with his beautiful assistant and pilot Chase Kolpath, travels around the galaxy hunting down rare artifacts whenever the mood takes him. In each novel, which read like a television detective program, Alex and Chase become embroiled in a mystery surrounding some artifact or another. Inevitably, somebody wants to keep something a secret, and attempts are made on their lives (usually someone sabotages their flying car), but in the end their perseverance pays off and they learn or find something really interesting. McDevitt reuses this formula each time, with slight variations, like changing the narrator after the first novel (A Talent for War), or doing the big reveal halfway through so that he can make the book about a disaster evacuation (The Devil's Eye), but overall the structure of each book is pretty much the same. Hell, even certain plot elements, like the sabotaged car, get reused too often. This predictability was getting to me by the time I started reading Echo, the fifth novel, but I still found the series worthwhile if only for McDevitt's fascinating depiction of the Mutes.

For this series, McDevitt has postulated that intelligence is incredibly rare in our galaxy. The Ashiyyur, or Mutes, as humans have nicknamed them, are the only other living alien race that humanity has encountered in their millennia amongst the stars. They are large, grey-skinned, fanged, evil looking monsters, most closely resembling gargoyles or demons. Their very presence makes peoples' skin crawl. Interestingly, they feel the same way about the tiny, hairy, unpredictable dwarf-monsters called humans. Humans refer to the Ashiyyur as Mutes because they don't speak, and actually communicate telepathically with one another. McDevitt spends some time working out how a society would develop if its member were unable to hide thoughts and feeling from one another, and he depicts the Mutes as thoughtful, disciplined, and sensitive with a predilection for philosophy and poetry.

The relationship between humans and Mutes is incredibly nuanced and, to me, realistic. Humans and Mutes are simultaneously friends, enemies, rivals, and allies. No single type of interaction can fully characterize their relations, and factions exist within each species that either loves or hates the other. Maybe we can describe the relationship is one of polite yet strained indifference, sort of like the relationship you may have with your neighbour who is a decent person but whose personal or cultural habits make you uncomfortable. With a bit of effort, humans and Mutes can understand and get along with one another, but that's not exactly a priority for either species. In short, McDevitt's depiction of human-Mute relations is both interestingly complex and realistically mundane; a combination that makes it refreshingly unique. With all this going for him, McDevitt still managed to squander all my good will with his cheap and overly simplistic treatment of a new alien species that Alex and Chase discover in the last half of Echo.

Rather than rehash the plot, I'm going to be really cheap and lazy and let the reviewers from amazon.com do it for me. You can find all the review I will be quoting here and here.

bmills writes "I can't recall reading another book that was as poorly thought out as McDevitt's Echo, and when the resolution is the big part of a story's problems, I think it's fair to include spoilers, so here goes.

The setting: The story is set at least 9,000 years in the future, but except for artificial intelligences and space travel, the characters live pretty much like 21st century people. Neither technology nor society seems to have progressed much in all that time. The characters have a shuttle that can routinely take them from a planet's surface to orbit, but this shuttle doesn't have enough thrust to cope with flying through the storm they encounter (so how does it make it to orbit?), and is shot down by regular old bullets, leaving it to look rather feeble for something that should be built to withstand the rigors of space travel. The entire society in which these characters live is convinced that there can be no such thing as intelligent aliens, even though there already is an intelligent alien race that they encountered many years before the setting of Echo and are still in contact with.

The plot: The protagonists are intrigued to hear about a stone with writing that may have come from an alien civilization after all, but the antagonists strenuously work to keep the heroes from examining this stone. However, when all is revealed at the end of the book, it turns out that the stone and its writing contained no clues whatsoever to the origin of the stone. In other words, there was no reason at all for the antagonists to try to keep this unhelpful thing away from the heroes. In fact, if the antagonists had not stolen the stone out from under the heroes in the first place, the protagonists might never have figured out who the villains of the story were, nor bothered to dig into the mystery at all, leaving the villains of Echo to look like utter idiots who brought their own downfall upon themselves. Along the way, following clues leads the protagonists to an uninhabited planet where they are lured into an ambush by a hostile agent. But the planet is, as I said, uninhabited. Where did the hostile agent come from? Has he been living alone on this planet for who knows how long, just hoping someone will try to investigate the mystery he's been hired to hide? Or are we to assume that he figured out where the heroes were going, somehow got there first, and set up the ambush? That's possible, but McDevitt simply never addresses the question. The protagonists eventually find the planet where the stone originated, but it turns out it's inhabited not by aliens, but is merely a lost human colony. But then in the epilogue, bizarrely enough, the narrator explains that subsequent examination revealed that the natives of this planet really were aliens after all, leaving the reader to conclude that it's mere coincidence that these people look exactly like humans from earth. So the protagonists find an alien intelligence (besides that one they've ALREADY known about for centuries) after all, but despite the fact that seeking aliens was the whole quest the heroes set out upon in the first place, the fact that these other people actually are aliens is tossed off as an afterthought. Not even the protagonists themselves seem impressed that they found the aliens they were hoping for in the first place.

Echo's fictional world is unimaginative, the mystery hinges on a clue that isn't a clue, the characters behave stupidly, and what should be the emotional climax of the story is buried in the epilogue. This book was so bad that I was angry I'd wasted my time reading it."

That pretty much sums it up for me. Whoever bmills is, I owe him or her a beer.

Now, my biggest problem is with the treatment of this new alien species. Let me summarize it for you. 1-Alex and Chase land on a planet with an old but unknown human colony. It's been there so long that the people actually claim to have been created there in prehistoric times. Unfortunately, their civilization was largely destroyed by an asteroid, and the last few survivors are just living out the end of days in a monastery-type place in the wilderness. 2-Chase and Alex live with these people for quite a while, and at no point do they ever even remotely suspect that they're not human. 3-In the epilogue McDevitt reveals that they actually are aliens, so...yay? The exact line from the novel is "The inhabitants, it turns out, were not human after all. They only have forty-two chromosomes." Yeah...that's it. Can you see my problem?

Now, my first reaction to this twist was that it must be a joke, but there is nothing in the book that would substantiate this idea. My conclusion, then, is that I've been trolled by an author. Does he really expect me to believe that these beings are so identical to humans that his main characters were fooled after living in very close quarters with them for days (or weeks, I don't remember)? Does he really expect me to believe that he forgot how to write about aliens? Look at how great the Mutes are. What the hell happened? Furthermore, is he trying to say that people with more or less chromosomes than "normal" aren't human anymore? Or is his biology just so woefully bad that he assumes he's being clever? To be honest, I'm so disappointed that I'm having trouble putting into words just how angry I am over this ending. Again, I'm going to let some other people say it for me.

jiminnyc writes, "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."

thepinkone writes, "The ending is so pathetic. NOTHING new happens. Recycled trash. If Jack McDevitt actually wrote this himself, he should be ashamed. I wonder if he even READ it. I seriously want my money back."

D. C Smith writes, "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."

Finally, Avid Reader writes, "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."

All of these people had the same reaction that I did. Disappointment, maybe even anger, and shock at being treated like fools by an author that we had all sort of liked. It's really disconcerting, and I'm reacting by never buying or recommending another one of McDevitt's novels. As I mentioned above, he has squandered all the good will I had towards him, and he can never get it back.

So where does this long, negative rant leave us? Frankly, I don't know. I started out wanting to say something about narrative consistency or maybe about treating your readers as if they're intelligent enough to see through your hand-waving, but I don't really think that I can say anything halfway interesting anymore. I guess I'm just venting on the interwebs.

Thanks for reading, maybe, and come back soon when I've decided to write about a book I like. Until then, don't read Echo. Go watch Columbo instead.