The Engines of God (Hutch) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

-It's written in a dull, lifeless manner.

-Everything is blaringly obvious. All points are hammered in repeatedly as though the author is afraid even one of his ideas should pass unnoticed.

-The characters are bland and generic, and are introduced and killed off for no discernible reason other than to have something taking place. The world's most brilliant archeologist, for instance, dies off in the first part of the book, never doing or saying anything that even remotely justifies his epithet.

-People keep uttering corny and stupid lines as though they're acting in a B-movie and need to say something memorable every time the book is about to switch to another scene. Such as:

"Maybe," he beamed, "we have something..."

Or:

"I'm not sure anymore," she said, "I'm really not sure..."

Or:

"Party time's over," said Janet as (...), "Time to go to work..."

-Several of the book's characters are supposed to be among the most brilliant and dedicated scientists on earth, yet they act like a bunch of stupid undergraduates: If a race has produced something of beauty, it's supposed to be strange that they've also produced something ugly. If an alien species on a planet are thought to be technologically advanced, it's unthinkable that others of the same species on the same planet should not be so. Wild speculations unsupported by facts are supposed to be brilliant inductions and deductions. Science is presented as a combination of Indiana Jones, riddle-solving and a trail of easter eggs.

-The plot keeps degenerating into uninteresting side-tracks. The main plot has to do with the Monument Makers, yet most of the book's bulk is taken up with several "sequences" that could easily be removed from the book without much loss, or stand alone as novellas: The race agains time to loot a temple on a planet about to be terraformed by a greedy corporation. The struggle to stay alive on a spaceship after a collision causes progressive failures in the life-support systems. Being attacked by monster-crabs with scalpels (sic).

-Not only are intelligent, alien creatures always remarkably similar to humans, but their culture is remarkably familiar too. All kinds of similarities abound, from brothels and religion and patriarchy and the zodiac and pictures on the wall of you and a friend waving at the camera and computer keyboards and whatnot.

-Finally: The conclusion to the book is just stupid. I'm not going to reveal it in case you still want to read the book, but it's not satisfying at any level. It's just a magical and silly creation that fits in well with a lot of the environmental thinking of today. And I'm not saying that just because I disagree with the author's opinions: I loved "Space Merchants" by Pohl and Kornbluth, which criticizes a lot of the same trends in human society that McDevitt seems to find disturbing, but on a much more intelligent and entertaining level.

The book is plot-driven but the author spends a whole lot of time trying to get us to understand the characters. That would be okay if they were interesting at all, but they're generic people who are too dull to care about.

It seems as if the author thought the story was too dull himself so he threw in events that really have nothing to do with the overall plot. For instance, when the characters go to the alien planet they've been looking for, they are attacked by deadly crab-creatures and we have to sit through that sequence before we can find out more about the plot. Couldn't they have run into trouble that was in some way related to what they were doing?

The actual secret the characters look for during the whole book turns out to be sort of ambiguous and is not explained in any way by the end. I suppose there will be a sequel, but I won't read it.

I found this book difficult to read and boring all at the same time. After the first 100 pages, the story goes absoultely nowhere and after another 100 pages the story still goes absoultely nowhere and so on. By the way, none of the characters come close to being remotely interesting or intriguing. HIGHLY NOT RECOMMENDED.

Instead, read EXPENDABLE by James Alan Gardner. A novel that's ten times more satisfying and better than this.