With Polaris , multiple Nebula Award-nominee Jack McDevitt reacquainted readers with Alex Benedict, his hero from A Talent for War. Alex and his assistant, Chase Kolpath, return to investigate the provenance of the cup. Alex and Chase follow a deadly trail to the Seeker - strangely adrift in a system barren of habitable worlds. But their discovery raises more questions than it answers, drawing Alex and Chase into the very heart of danger.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Ideas abound in McDevitt's classy riff on the familiar lost-space-colony theme. In 2688, interstellar transports Seeker and Bremerhaven left a theocratic Orwellian Earth to found a dictator-free society, Margoliaβand vanished. Nine thousand years later, with a flawed humanity spread over 100-odd worlds, Margolia and its ships have become Atlantis-type myths, but after a cup from Seeker falls into the hands of antiquarian Alex Benedict, the hero of McDevitt's Polaris (2004), Alex determines to win everlasting fame and vaster fortune by finding them. Female pilot Chase Kolpath, this book's narrator, gutsily tracks the ancient Seeker on a breathless trek across star systems and through an intriguing mystery plot, a bevy of fully realized characters, ingenious AI ships and avatars of long-departed personalities who offer advice and entertainment. The scientific interpolations are as convincing as the far-future planetscapes and human and alien societies, bolstering an irresistible tractor beam of heavy-duty action. This novel delivers everything it promisesβwith a galactic wallop.
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From Booklist
McDevitt's latest gripping novel of future history begins in the late twentieth century, when a technological breakthrough costs the lives of its discoverers. Then it jumps seven centuries forward, to the beginning of interstellar flight and some of the first refugees from Earth. Finally, it moves into the very far future and to the seeker of the title, one of several looking for inhabited worlds that are the results, however longterm, of events recorded earlier. McDevitt is now being compared, quite legitimately, to Arthur C. Clarke, and not only because he has a similar kind of grand vision of the human future among the stars. He also has characters with amiable, or not-so-amiable, quirks, who in the middle of deciphering the secrets of lost races take time to worry about where to get a good meal in the next town. One of these days McDevitt is going to receive an actual and well-deserved big award to go with his professional stature. Roland Green
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