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The End of Evolution? A Review of Village in the Sky [1]

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Date: 2023-02-07

Jack McDevitt has been writing books in the Alex Benedict series since 1989, though most of them came out since 2004. I haven't read all of them, but i have generally read most of them. They follow Benedict and his pilot, one time lover, and usual point of view character (the usual conceit is that we are reading her chronicle of their adventure) as they ride around the far future galaxy looking for artifacts they can sell and solving historical mysteries. I have enjoyed all of them even if they cannot be described as great, until this one.

And that is not entirely fair, to be honest. This book still has a lot of strengths. McDevitt is very good at making his worlds feel lived in. You get a good sense of how the characters spend their time in the mundane, and through that, you get a good sense of how the characters see their world. You enjoy hanging out with them because it feels natural, even if you don't always like the people you are hanging out with entirely.

Part of that lived in feel, though, probably comes from the familiarity. McDevitt's world is very much a 21st century one with spaceships and intelligent computers. People go to plays, read books, play instruments for each other, and play basketball and volleyball. They just do it on other worlds and in spaceships. their political scandals echo our own and their governments are all basically representative democracies.

Generally, that unimaginativeness is not really an issue because the stories are fun yarns. The historical mysteries are usually compelling and twisty with the solution not easy to see. The adventures are fast paced and tightly plotted, and they very often hinge on a piece of hard science in an unexpected way. the resolutions are satisfying from a plot and character perspective. And while they may not be Tolstoy (and who is?) they often have an interesting comment on some aspect of human nature by the time they are done.

Warning, here follow spoilers for some aspect of the book. If you want the bottom line, this novel is probably worth picking up only for fans of the previous books in the series.

I have often wondered, though, if the familiar nature of the society and people was a subtle comment on the nature of humanity and the limits of society. Did McDevitt believe in a kind of end of history, that society was somehow destined to arrive at toughly the place the western democracies found themselves in the early 21st century? It turns out he does, but in making that point with this book, he has written the least enjoyable one in the series.

During the course of the book, humans encounter three alien races, which is two more than they had encountered in all of human history to that point. And two of those races, the two that are not-hive minds, turn out to be pretty much like 21st century Americans. Multiple characters comment on this and come to the conclusion that society can only be ordered in just so many ways. The big problem at the end of the book is solved with a very modern appeal to avoiding bad press. The book spends so much time setting this argument up that the usual clever mystery and hard science weird solution is missing, and with is a lot of the fun.

In addition, after having just finished The Dawn of Everything (yes, I am aware of the criticisms. As far as I can tell, none of them dent the argument that human history has been much more varied and less deterministic than we are currently taught to believe), it is hard to swallow that humans would be just like us ten thousand years in the future, much less that aliens would.

The book is not without its charms. McDevitt has lost nothing of his ability to make you inhabit a character's world, and there is a lot of fun in doing just that in even such a mildly paced adventure as this. And if you've been reading along, revisiting old friends is nice. It is just not as fun a visit as it used to be.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/7/2151489/-The-End-of-Evolution-A-Review-of-Village-in-the-Sky

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