Cauldron [Mass Market Paperback]

As the finale of the "Engines of God" series, this book is the anti-climax to end all anti-climaxes. "The Engines of God" was just about perfect: excitingly paced, with a wonderful, complex mystery at its heart. Huge, brilliant ideas were presented in an extremely readable way. It was so good, I read the entire thing out loud to my spouse.

Warning: spoilers ahead... not that it really matters.

As the series continued in later books, we got a few side trips and red herrings, but the galaxy-spanning mystery was still magnificent and seemed to only grow deeper and richer the more we learned. When at last, Hutch offers her theory for the mystery's origin -- objects d'art from a hyper-advanced race -- I was blown away. I loved this idea and it had my imagination buzzing for weeks. THE SERIES SHOULD HAVE ENDED HERE.

But... then we got an utterly pointless rip-off of Rendezvous With Rama ("Chindi") and an equally pointless detour to visit the Moonriders, which went nowhere.

And now... Cauldron. What a turkey, and what a massively bungled way to end the series.

Where to even begin?
* The first two-thirds of the book are excruciatingly boring. Hutch is old, and space travel is on the ropes. Got it. Why wasn't this dealt with in a single chapter, instead of hundreds of pages?
* Despite all this time for character drawing, by the end of the book, I realized all of the non-Hutch characters shared roughly the same face in my mind's eye. The only thing that distinguishes one character from another is their name. Also, it's 500 years in the future and everybody is still named Jon and Rudy and so on?
* The serial mysteries that are described in the final third of the book are just silly. There's a race of cartoon creatures who act like Keystone Cops and live forever. There's an abandoned planet that has the remains of a civilization -- normally fertile ground for Mr. McDevitt's tales -- that turns out to be pointless and one of the characters dies there. Whatever. The "lighthouse" near a black hole is interesting, but takes up only a few pages. What's up with throwing a great idea away like that?
* The mystery of the omega clouds is revealed to be... drumroll please... THE MONSTER FROM STAR TREK V???? What???? Let me get this straight: this thing can breathe vacuum, it can generate hyper-advanced nanotech at will, it can instantly communicate with an alien species, it has lived for millions of years, but it can't pull itself out of a ditch? Why not? If it's simply the gravity of the galactic center holding it in place, why can the human ships navigate it so easily?
* Why does the animal have eyes? If it can build the clouds and a replica of a human ship in an instant, what use would it have with the visual spectrum?
* Why is it so stupid?
* It already had its hands on their ship -- what more did it need to copy their design?
* At first, they can only communicate with it through sign language, which sets up all sorts of interesting challenges, but then it speaks to them in English. Cop-out! And what's up with these alien races being able to speak perfect English, like the Moonriders? This is lazy!
* How is it possible the monster is unaware of other life forms in the galaxy? From this series alone, we've learned of about a dozen or so in a relatively small volume of space.
* Most important of all: what happened to the sense of awe and wonder? I got the sense that Mr. McDevitt just couldn't care less about this book, and that is devastating to me. Why put love into a pointless knock-off like "Chindi" and leave just a handful of pages here for resolving one of the great mysteries in the last few decades of speculative fiction?

Why? Why?

I've enjoyed all that I've read of Jack McDevitt's previous works, but I'm afraid that "Cauldron" was a deep disappointment. The previous books in the "Academy" series were well written and typically fast paced ("Odyssey" got a little slow at times,) but this particular piece was uncharacteristically dull and more than a bit dry.

The first HALF of the book is spent discussing the development and testing of a new FTL drive. Very few of these two hundred or so pages are even remotely interesting, and are often somewhat infuriating in their slow, plodding pace. The core "dilemma" of the first half of the novel revolves around a testing procedure and the world's top minds failing to conceive of a simple principle: test your potentially explosive initial prototype on the simplest (and least expensive) framework possible. Then again, without this ridiculous plot element, McDevitt would only have had half a book.

The remainder of the book feels like the author's attempt to close up a number of dangling loose ends from earlier in the series... all at once. Each remaining mystery -- including the origins of the Chindi, the Omega Clouds, and a millenia old alien radio transmission -- is resolved in a few dozen dull pages. And those disappointed by Star Trek V (yeah, the one with Spock's brother) may very well be moved to fits of hysterical rage by the novel's ending.

McDevitt seems to be stuck on a few simple themes: governments and taxpayers are uninterested in funding space exploration, technological civilizations are rare and typically manage to destroy or at least cripple themselves pretty quickly, and human beings appear to be the only species capable of developing FTL travel. Each is an entertaining topic, to be sure, but Jack McDevitt seems to be obsessed with repeating them over and over, ultimately to the ruination of what appears to be the final volume in an otherwise excellent series.

Cauldron is the 6th book in the series featuring plucky space captain Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins. Hutch is a great character: smart, resourceful, heroic in a pinch, yet still a down-to-Earth, decent gal. For decades, she ferried researchers and celebrities to explore distant worlds, unearth ruins, solve mysteries, and narrowly escape hopeless situations. In the previous book, Odyssey, Hutch was sadly stuck behind an administrator's desk. I am happy to report that in Cauldron, she is back in the saddle.

By the mid 23rd century, space exploration has fallen on hard times. Government cutbacks and public apathy have shut down Hutch's Academy of Science and Technology. As Earth turns inward, only a dwindling few keep the dream of interstellar travel alive. Hutch, a spokesperson for the cause, is approached by a young physicist with plans for a revolutionary drive system, one that could cut travel times by a factor of 20 or more. The claim sounds outlandish, but if true, it would open almost the entire galaxy to human exploration and colonization. It would even be possible to track down the source of the destructive Omega Clouds, which featured prominently in earlier books.

The first part of Cauldron deals with the design-on-a-dime efforts to build the new stardrive. The real fun starts when Hutch and company take the new ships out for a spin. McDevitt never loses his enthusiasm for exploration; every planet or race or artifact is a puzzle just waiting to be solved. It's not psychologically deep, perhaps, but it is always interesting, fast-paced, and fun. The last few chapters, especially, were top notch.

Cauldron feels like the end of the series. It ties up some loose ends from earlier books, and Hutch sounds content to pass the torch on to others. If so, bravo to her and McDevitt for going out on a high note. Cauldron is not a monumental work, but it is an excellent read. I give it 4 1/2 stars, rounded up to five. Enjoy!

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