Slow Lightning

Since my last book reviews, I’ve read another of the books I bought for my birthday – Slow Lightning by Jack McDevitt. McDevitt has written some very good books, including one of my all-time favourites, A Talent for War. So, I had high hopes for Slow Lightning. This book tells the story of a missing person, a missing ship and a missing answer, investigating a mystery three decades old in the story world. Kim Brandywine’s sister went missing nearly 30 years ago after getting into a taxi on her return from a deep-space mission looking for aliens (despite hundreds of years of searching, no alien life of any sort has yet been discovered). The question of how and why she disappeared takes Kim far from her comfortable life as a PR rep for a scientific research institute. She investigates, goes into danger, steals spaceships and, yes, eventually finds the answer, which is well laid in advance but nonetheless surprising.

Sadly, though, I didn’t enjoy the book as a whole as much as I thought I might. In this book, McDevitt investigates the same themes of heroism, sacrifice and greatness as A Talent for War, but he does so in a very similar way. Indeed, the structures of the two books are very similar – the plot details are different but much of the progression of action is very similarly structured. So, even though I was reading a new book, it often had a strange feeling of deja vu. If you’ve never read McDevitt (and shame on you if that’s so!), you could do worse than start here – the plotting is tight, the characterisation (especially of the characters we never meet – a McDevitt speciality) excellent and the world engaging. However, it fails to achieve the same greatness as A Talent for War, partly because it cannot draw on the same archetypes; the continuing theme of Man and Olympian in Talent is part of what drives the story. Ultimately, then, I’d recommend that you get hold of a copy of A Talent for War instead because it exceeds Slow Lightning in every category. Good but not great.

pax et bonum

Article posted at 11:44am on 01 July 2005
Category: Books, Life, Struggling, General