As a check on the bookshop shelves will show Jack McDevitt has dealt before with our heirs and survivors studying the relics of our civilisation as they try to live in the wreckage. In ANCIENT SHORES they found these ruins across the planets. ETERNITY ROAD has a closer timeframe.
Among other things, ETERNITY ROAD recognises its forebears, and like George Stewart's EARTH ABIDES, it deals with a world devastated by plague. Set some unascertainable time in the future, the plague has also yet to come, yet it will come soon according to the technology that the Illyrians will find. They call us the Roadmakers, and can think of no way in which our vehicles would have run on the road, they know only how quickly the plague struck from the way we left our cars everywhere blocking the ways along which their ponies and traps might otherwise use. Later, though, among the ruins they find a maglev train, a computer of intense sentience (suffering from extreme loneliness), phasers set permanently to stun, and robots forever protecting banks and forever waiting for the police to come and collect the intruders they detain. They find these last things as they make the epic journey to find Haven, the place where the Roadmakers built a last refuge and left the secrets of their success.
Illyria is a frontier community on the Mississippi, and Haven is somewhere else. That the party knows because one man has returned, all his companions dead, but with a copy of Mark Twain's CONNECTICUT YANKEE, and so they set out, a small group of protagonists (woodsman, pining lover, priestess who has lost her faith - the usual really), to find that place. I was sometimes unsure and did not recognise the points on the journey, but ultimately they travel up to the Great Lakes, across into Canada and then down the Hudson. The last part of the voyage is by balloon. Luckily their balloonist is an all round master of technology, for when they finally find the place of books it is he who saves the expedition from a watery grave.
This is a short book to describe an epic journey, particularly as it is nearly page 100 before the party sets off. But in some ways that is good thing - Stirling Lanier's classic HIERO'S JOURNEY is about the same length (though McDevitt has written SF not fantasy). Where I am less sure is where it crosses from pastiche into cliché - EARTH ABIDES is now nearly fifty years old and it is nice to see a sideways tribute to it, but ETERNITY ROAD also uses the now current clichés of wrecked societies - frontier police, renegade pirates, technology treated as magic, and the use of the hot air balloon as a rapid transit. And uses none of them with any great originality. McDevitt is capable of these in places (the robot guard in the bank is one I've not come across before, though the escape from the guard copies a logic puzzle from STAR TREK and DARK STAR), I only wish there were more.
I gained something from keeping other books in mind as I read this. Ideally, someone who read ETERNITY ROAD should then read Stewart or Wyndham's THE CHRYSALIDS. I only wish it would not make new readers feel they had read either of them before. Return to Home Page