Ancient Shores

by Jack McDevitt

Book Overview

It turned up in a North Dakota wheat field--a triangle, like a shark's fin, sticking up from the black loam. It was the rudder of a 42 foot sailboat. Tom's wheat field had once been on the shoreline... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061054267
• Release Date: October 1996
• Publisher: Harper Voyager
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.8" x 1.0" x 4.2"

Customer Reviews

Great for 75% of book

This was a terrific book until you get to the end. The ending is contrived and frankly detracted from what could have been a great book.

Classic-Style Science Fiction The Way It Oughta Be!

A seemingly normal day out working on a North Dakota farm that turns up the tip of what turns out to be a perfectly preserved ancient sailboat buried for 10,000 years is just the beginning of this classic-style but fresh and inventive science fiction novel. The Laskers' farm where the boat is found is, as it turns out, on the precise location of what was thousands of years ago Lake Aggasiz, and the discovery prompts media curiosity followed by widespread media coverage, rumors of an elaborate hoax, carloads of excited sightseers - and shortly thereafter, much, much more. It's not until samples sent away to a lab indicate that the material the ship is made of is a transuranic element - an element Way up on the periodic table (No. 161 in this case), that's not found in nature and therefore apparantly artificially created, despite the fact that nobody on Earth has the technology to do so - that the find goes light years beyond being an object of passing curiosity on the global public's radar. A search is launched along other land that was once part of the vanished lake, and something is indeed found; not a sailboat this time. This isn't even a third of the way through the book and the twists have just begun. And unlike some books, it doesn't start to run out of steam once time for revelations approaches. Mixing science, wonder, adventure and mystery; and drawing on everything from international politics, UFO theories, contemporary Native American socio-cultural conditions, military applications of new technologies and a ton of other diverse fields, "Ancient Shores" brings it all together wonderfully. Perhaps best of all, the characters are vital and interesting; this is not a novel where astounding discoveries are being made and those making them go about it all mechanically and virtually without emotion. There's real feeling here: excitement, passion, fear, jealously, nobility, pettiness, love, yearning and intrigue; each of the wealth of major characters has their own personality and their own lives outside of the mysteries of the prehistoric lake, which makes the book both more enjoyable and more believable. Add to this an unpredictable, one-of-a-kind ending and you've got a classic. I agree with others who say there should be more. If only one out of, say, fifty, science fiction novels were to be sequelized this should be in that two per cent, without question. An excellent novel.

Simple but Compelling

This is one of those novels that seemed to have been written in a single burst of creative energy. It is much simpler than his later novels (particularly the "Hutch" series) but in its way it is also much better. The writing seems more focused, the characters seem more "real" and the scientific explanations are as compelling and literate as ever.McDevitt's specialty is first contact and that is what this is all about. In a way, it's a lot like the fulfillment of the fantasies of any sci-fi enthusiast - run across an ancient, buried object that happened to have strange powers. Great story and great ending...

This Book makes me wish for a Sequel!

Fast paced and "Clean" with real world consequences and reactions to the discovery of Alien Artifacts! I Loved this book! This book was A one night read which gets you 5 stars from me almost every time! My only gripe (very small one) is the ending of the book where a group of "friends" get in the act! I would have liked it much better if "they" were involved earlier! This is My favorite Book By McDevitt! (so far I've Read "Moonfall", "Eternity Road" and "Engines of God" which are definite buy recommendations from me!) All in all you can not ask for much better in a Science Fiction Novel and I hope Mr. McDevitt will write a sequel because I am dying to find out about the other "destination" possibilities!

Sturgeonesque --- bucollic SF, very well done

Imagine you find a sailing ship burried on your land --- except there's no ocean around, and hasn't been one for tens of thousands of years. Then imagine that the metallurgists can't identify the material the sailing ship is made from. That's the beginning of this Jack McDevitt novel ... the first McDevitt novel I've read (I'd seen his short fiction before). It won't be the last. In the best SF style, McDevitt just keeps asking question after question after question, and the answers get bigger and bigger and bigger. A really first-rate book, despite the terrible cover art.