Bestselling SF author Jack McDevitt talks to John Joseph Adams of Sci Fi. He discusses his new novel,
Odyssey (Ace) and why he prefers character-driven SF to stories driven by plot.
Since the Omega Clouds seem to have been taken care of, at least for the time being, what's at stake in Odyssey?
McDevitt: UFOs are still around, although, in the 23rd century they're called moonriders. As is the case today, nobody really believes they're there. Then they suddenly become too prominent to ignore. They begin doing mindless things, like turning an asteroid toward a world with a biozone, but on which no one lives. Why attack the equivalent of deer? And firing another asteroid at an orbiting hotel under construction in another star system. What's going on?
Meantime, a 15-year-old temporarily marooned in an orbiting museum gets a chilling message from a ghostly Priscilla Hutchins. And Gregory MacAllister finds some of the answers in the "hellfire trial," where the country is debating whether scaring the devil out of kids with detailed descriptions of what awaits sinners in the next world constitutes child abuse.
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For me, the pleasure to be derived from SF comes largely not from putting, say, a spectacle on display. It's not the simple act of using a starship to watch a collision between two stars. Rather, it's watching the reactions of the characters who get to live the experience. It's watching people react to the notion that the edge of the universe runs through their dining room, or that the guy next door has a nuclear-powered refrigerator. That's what I'm interested in. The reaction. I don't really care that my uncle Frank owns a combination pool table/time machine. But I want to be there when somebody finds out about it.
Odyssey is in bookstores now. You can visit Jack's website here.
