This is one book that I found difficult to put down! True to his form, McDevitt asks the question: "Are we all alone?" Priscilla Hutchins (Hutch), yes from Deepsix fame, is back. Here she's Captain of a ship filled with passengers looking to make "first contact". What follows is a series of adventures and mishaps involving alien lifeforms, fantastic space scenary, interesting characters and inter-personal relationships and a rescue mission unlike anything previous. The Chindi (indian term for night spirit) a hugh spacecraft, provides the focus for the principal characters and, true to McDevitt form, additional food for thought, mystery and wonder.

McDevitt continues his hard science approach to his books along with his apparent interest in archaeology and archaeologists. All of these elements are combined with his central theme of "are we alone?" to give the reader a thoroughly enjoyable reading experience. Reading Deepsix prior to reading Chindi is not absolutely necessary, but might help the reader better understand Hutch and some of the references to Deepsix made in Chindi.

In this future, humanity is exploring the galaxy with faster-than-light travel, but no intelligent life has been discovered. A group called the Contact Society organizes an expedition to investigate probes discovered around a neutron star, hoping they mean intelligent life. The Academy, the primary explorers, humors them with a pilot since the Society founder is a major donor to the non-profit Academy.

The adventure begins, with nice space opera touches, including the trademark McDevitt alien ruins. All the while, Academy bureaucrats take credit or hand out blame for events they had no control over. With the FTL radio, conversations have long gaps, and clever characters use them to be deliberately unhelpful to the meddling bureaucrats.

Speaking of clever characters, there's Hutch, the practical and competent Academy captain whose professional life is better than her personal life; Tor, a famous artist and an ex-lover of Hutch's; Bill, the ship's AI, who changes personality to fit the situation; and Alyx, a famous actress/spokesperson for the Contact Society. However, some expedition members never focused for me.

I do like how the same characters act intelligently sometimes, and foolishly at other times. One character talks about all-female space ship crews: all male crews are too competitive and mixed crews have women raising men's testosterone levels into doing something stupid, an idea I found amusing and believable.

Recommended.

Jack McDevitt is probably my favorite author currently writing science fiction, and Chindi was a particularly fascinating, thrilling read. Like one of the spaceships in the story, the novel takes a little while to get up and going, but once it does, it is edge-of-your-seat action all the way. The story starts with a mysterious signal picked up in the vicinity of a neutron star. Satellites are left in orbit, and five years later they pick up the indecipherable signal again. Priscilla Hutchins ("Hutch") is chosen to pilot a craft housing members of the Contact Society (a private group of extraterrestrial enthusiasts and believers) to the star, while another ship travels to the possible destination of the signal. Here begins a monumental, interstellar journey filled with great discovery and great tragedy. Hutch and her passengers pursue the signal through several star systems, finding proof of advanced alien civilizations but no aliens they can speak to. When they attempt to explore one world populated by large, clothed avian beings, their hopes of making contact are dashed rather brutally. One of the most interesting sites they explore is the Retreat, a large house filled with seemingly human, albeit over-sized, artifacts-library, desks, shelves of books (frozen in the cold vacuum), beds, etc. The Retreat sits on a small moon offering a gorgeous view of a two-star system of great majesty and beauty. It is here that they discover another ship, proof of advanced extraterrestrial life, and the rest of the plot revolves around their attempts to learn the secrets the ship holds and to return home. Finding their way back ends up being the most difficult and definitely most thrilling part of their journey.

Chindi actually marks Hutch's third appearance in McDevitt's novels, a fact which I did not discover before I was well into the story. It is not necessary to know the story of Hutch's earlier missions in order to read and enjoy this particular novel, though. The cast of characters is interesting but improbable-the Contact Society team members are not scientists. They include an actress/producer, an artist, a funeral home director, and similarly unscientific men and women. One is, of course, a former love interest of Hutch, and that adds a little more flavor to the pot. These people make mistakes, and some of them pay with their lives, yet they all emerge as truly heroic souls who want nothing more than to answer the cosmic questions man has been posing as long as he has looked at the stars and wondered if he was alone in the universe. The science of McDevitt's science fiction works pretty well, although I have a problem with a couple of things that happened. I found McDevitt's characters to be vibrant, real, and interesting, although I understand some readers apparently do not find them as interesting as I do. We don't get to the essence of them all, and Hutch's future is left quite unresolved at the end, but I came to know and like everyone in this novel, despite their blunders and often childlike enthusiasm. There is a whole lot of action in these pages, particularly in the latter half of the novel, and I was flat-out riveted by it. Hutch in particular is almost unbelievably heroic yet constantly vulnerable and afraid (i.e., real). I heartily recommend Chindi to fans of great science fiction. It is one of the most memorable science fiction novels I have ever read.

... the early 1960s BBC series "A for Andromeda" and "Andromeda Breakthrough," written by Fred Hoyle and John Eliott. In this program, a radio signal is received from the direction of Andromeda containing instructions to build a computer. When it is built, the computer asks a series of questions and eventually builds a replica human being. And so on (with the major "bad guys" coming from a corporation called Intel!!).

The 2 series were novelised and are fairly easy to find 2nd hand or in a library, so judge for yourself.

I view this novel as a remarkably faithful translation of Stanislaw Lem's _His Master's Voice_, except most of the thought-provoking chapters have been left out. The climax/conclusions are identical, however, and I suppose that's a good thing.

The Hercules Text was Jack McDevitt's first novel and probably his best. It follows the same theme as the better known novel Contact by Carl Sagan--alien transmissions from outer space being received by humans and their subsequent reactions to the knowledge that "we are not alone"--but I believe McDevitt's novel is much better. It also must be noted that McDevitt wrote and published The Hercules Text before Sagan published his book. The thing I liked about McDevitt's book is that he seemed to have a clearer grasp than Sagan of the contrasts between science and religion and how the different disciplines affect people's lives. McDevitt seems to understand that just because someone is a theist doesn't automatically make them a buffoon (I believe this was one of Sagan's shortcomings). The characterizations in both novels, though, are excellent, and I must admit that Sagan did have a better grasp of the science aspect of the theme. I recommend The Hercules Text wholeheartedly. A good read, well worth the time.