Seeker
by Jack McDevitt
Summary
Ten thousand years from now, Alex Benedict deals in antiquities. He and his pilot Chase Kolpath find the objects that survive from earlier periods of human expansion, authenticate them, and sell them, which makes them treasure hunters as far as the archaeological establishment is concerned and archaeologists as far as they are concerned themselves.
A woman brings in a cup with unfamiliar markings. It is nine thousand years old and it comes from the Seeker, one of two ships that carried a colony away from an authoritarian Earth to found a world called Margolia, which was never heard from again and has been assumed legendary ever since.
The cup means someone found the ship. Alex and Chase follow the provenance backwards through dealers, estates and a series of people who are unhelpful in ways that become alarming, and then out into unsurveyed space to look for the colony itself. Somebody would prefer they stopped, and is willing to arrange accidents.
McDevitt writes this as a detective story with starships: the pleasure is the chain of inference, the interviews, the archive searches and the deductions from a manifest.
Around three hundred and seventy pages, plainly written, comfortable and quick, with the human future looking a lot like the present at longer range.
Chase narrates, which is the series' best decision. Alex is the one with the intuitions and the reputation, and she is the one flying the ship, doing the legwork and pointing out when he is being insufferable.
It is the third Alex Benedict book and stands alone. Best for readers who want archaeology, a mystery and stakes that stay human sized, and a far future that is comfortable rather than apocalyptic.
Historical Context & Significance
Seeker won the 2006 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the only Nebula of Jack McDevitt's career despite a remarkable run of nominations across three decades.
It is the third in the Alex Benedict series, after A Talent for War and Polaris, which now runs past a dozen volumes and is unusual in the field for treating the far future as a setting for antiquarianism rather than for war.
McDevitt came to writing late, after working as a naval officer, an English teacher, a customs inspector and a motivational trainer for the United States Customs Service, and published his first novel in his early fifties. Stephen King described him as the logical heir to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, a line his publishers have used ever since.