Firebird (2011) by Jack McDevitt

In
2021, I began a small expedition into science-fiction territory with
the Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath series, written by Jack
McDevitt , which takes place a hundred centuries in the future as
humanity has spread itself across the Milky Way System –
accumulating ten-thousand years of history, space-age artifacts and
unresolved mysteries. Alex Benedict, " the world's most
celebrated antique dealer ," earns a living with Chase Kolpath
tracking down rare, long-lost artifacts and dragging answers to
age-old historical mysteries out of the mists of time. So the series
is a distant cousin of the detective story and McDevitt cited G.K.
Chesterton 's Father Brown stories as a source of inspiration,
while readers compared the series to a Space Opera Ellery
Queen . The
series began with the world-building A
Talent for War (1989), in which Alex Benedict tracks down a
legendary and long-lost warship, but the mystery element emerged in
the next two novels. Polaris
(2004) is a locked room mystery, of sorts, concerning a scientific
expedition that vanished from a sealed space yacht and Seeker
(2004) concerns the historical mystery of a lost space colony from
the Third Millennium. Regrettably, Echo
(2010) turned out to be the first dud in the series undermining the
world-building of the previous novels with an ending that wanted it
both ways and an epilogue that made everything even worse. So began
to wonder if I had gotten all out of the series that was of interest
to me and the time had come to abandon it, but then got news a new
title was forthcoming, Village in the Sky (2023). It sounded
intriguing enough to see if the next was a return to form and perhaps
continue with the series after all.   Firebird
(2011) is the sixth title in the series and begins when Karen Howard
contacts Rainbow Enterprises to tell them she inherited the estate of
her sister, Elizabeth Robin, who was married to Christopher Robin.
Karen Howard has some personal items that belonged to her
brother-in-law that she wants to put on the market. Benedict and
Kolpath are tasked with getting the best price for the collection. Christopher
Robin was a controversial physicist who " explored the fringes of
science " like whether consciousnesses can survive death, the
multiverse and " thought maybe we were getting occasional
visitors from one " – like sightings of unidentified starships
that fade out (" ships from another reality? "). So he was
someone who " asked questions nobody else dared to ask " and " looking for breakthroughs in areas that are considered beyond
the pale by most of his colleagues ." But what gave him fame was
his mysterious, never explained disappearance. One day, Robin had " come home from somewhere, had gotten out of a skimmer at his
front door, and never made it into his house ." Nobody knows
whether he accidentally fell into the ocean and the body was carried
out to sea, got pushed or simply disappeared voluntarily. Maybe the
physicist had " walked across a bridge into an alternate
reality ." So
more than enough angles to drum up public interest and drive up the
demand for the Robin artifacts, but, once Benedict begins to dig into
the mysteries the physicist left behind, he simply can't let go.
Decades ago, Robin witnessed one of these phantom vehicles that have
been reported over the centuries and was able to get pictures of it.
Curiously, Robin had been present at previous, never explained
sighting of another unidentified ship. When they learn Robin had been
buying and losing yachts at an alarming rate, it became impossible to
ignore. Was he actually trying sending " the yachts into one of
these alternate universes he was always talking about " or
something else? A
fascinating premise for a futuristic-historical, quasi-mystery, but
the mystery of Robin's disappearance and his equally mysterious and
secretive experiments become something of a MacGuffin. Benedict and
Kolpath eventually figure out what Robin was up to, but the
implications of their discovery shifts the story in a different
direction with the physicist becoming a bit of an afterthought by the
end ( ROT13 /SPOILER: arire
ernccrnevat be trggvat erfphrq, ohg na rdhngvba naq fuvc ner anzrq
nsgre uvz ). However, it makes an engrossing science-fiction yarn
and has a really good subplot centering on the advanced A.I. that's
are all over the place. While hunting for clues, Benedict and Kolpath
go to Villanueva, " colonized during the Great Migration "
and " gone now almost as long as Adam and Eve ,” which
became a religious settlement that suffered an end-of-days
catastrophe – getting swallowed by " a massive dust cloud ."
The people who refused to evacuate died and only their A.I. systems
came out of it unscathed, which somehow remained operative and tidied
everything up. But they're incredibly hostile to humans. So the
planet is declared a no-go area. Benedict and Kolpath eventually come
under attack after landing, but they manage to escape and rescue an
Elementary School A.I. (Charlie) who had pleaded to be rescued (" I
thought of what it would be like, trapped in an elementary school for
seven thousand years "). This has some serious consequences when
Charlie asks them to help rescue the other A.I. trapped on
Villanueva. Something that damages and stains Benedict's reputation
and public image. So,
in the end, Firebird is a much better science-fiction novel
than hybrid mystery and therefore misses the appeal of Polaris
and Seeker , because it's the historical mysteries that
attracted me to the series in the first place. However, I can also
see McDevitt needed to go heavy on the science-fiction in Firebird
to setup the next two novels, Coming Home (2014) and Octavia
Gone (2019), which appear to resolve a plot-thread that was
introduced in the first book. Hopefully, they'll prove to be Polaris
and Seeker of the second (or is that third?) phase in this
engrossing series. But, speaking as a detective fanboy, it's a little
tragic that this series was not conceived as a full-blown
science-fiction mystery hybrid. So many of the worlds depicted in
this series would lend themselves perfectly for all kind of different
detective and thriller stories (see previous reviews for
suggestions). To
cut a long, rambling review short, Firebird comes recommended
to fans of the series, but, if you're only interested in the mystery
element, you should (for now) stick with the first three titles in
the series.