The Engines of God (The Academy, #1) in Building a SciFi/Fantasy Library

Jul 13, 2011 Mike rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: scifi

This one gets a good 4 Stars for a great space mystery story, enigmas in space archeology. Recently (within the past few thousand years) space-going civilizations have disappeared. Traces of violent action are found but are unclear. Great space monuments are found. The archeology team is exploring ruins on an earth-like planet scheduled for terraforming to enable future human occupation. The story suffered from an artificial pace, the science team must evacuate so nuclear explosives can melt the ...more

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Sep 28, 2022 Harold Ogle rated it really liked it

Shelves: space, sf, aliens, apocalypse, santa-clara-county-library

Recommendation: An engaging science fiction novel about contact with aliens, both ancient (archaeology) and current.

Critique: This is a very fun novel with a lot of positive things working for it. The idea that humans traveling amongst the stars are more likely to find only the remains of long-dead aliens than anything living is really compelling. Like with Daniel Keys Moran's Tales of the Continuing Time series, world-building transitions are often presented in the form of news headlines, givin Recommendation: An engaging science fiction novel about contact with aliens, both ancient (archaeology) and current.

Critique: This is a very fun novel with a lot of positive things working for it. The idea that humans traveling amongst the stars are more likely to find only the remains of long-dead aliens than anything living is really compelling. Like with Daniel Keys Moran's Tales of the Continuing Time series, world-building transitions are often presented in the form of news headlines, giving us a sense of what's happening on Earth to distract humanity from the dry subject of advances in the studies of alien civizations. There's one weird part that stood out to me: we meet the main protagonist, Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, as she is pining for the illicit love affair she had with a married businessman. I'm not really sure why that's in the book; it's not relevant to the character and doesn't play into her character motivations (or at least it doesn't in any way that I could see other than a sort of hackneyed "I've got nothing left to lose" Hollywood-style motivation). The story is exciting, I got invested in the characters and really cared about what happened to them. The book sort of works like a mystery, in that there's a puzzle that the protagonists are trying to solve that we as the reader of much science fiction can accurately intuit, and there's a tension in trying to see how the characters will arrive at the same solution logically and methodically. This process is done well.

Review: First, the setting: Priscilla Hutchins ("Hutch") is a pilot in an era when mankind has developed FTL travel. Various weird monuments have been found throughout the galaxy, the closest one being on Saturn's moon, Iapetus: a statue of a giant, clawed, bird-headed biped facing Saturn. The development of personal Flickinger force fields has freed humans from the confines of bulky space suits, which has enabled the fine motor work that led to a renaissance in archaeology. Archaeology has expanded to the stars, with most of the cutting-edge work being done on alien civilizations. There are three ancient civilizations that have been discovered: the Nok (which are still alive and are off-limits due to some Prime Directive), the Quraqua, and the Beta Pacifica. Next, the plot: (view spoiler)[Priscilla works closely with a team of archaeologists from the Academy of Science and Technology who have been excavating ruins on Quraqua for decades. Quraqua had a cyclical civilization: they'd built an advanced civilization, which seems to have ended 9,000 years ago. Then they started over and built a new civilization, and then they died out just a single thousand years ago. There is also a Monument in the Quraquan stellar system: a grid of rectilinear "buildings" that resembles a city.

The Academy archaeologists' work is coming to a close because a billionaire Earth developer, Caseway, is spearheading a movement to terraform Quraqua for human settlement. This process begins with nuking the polar ice caps on the world, which will create gigantic tsunamis and sea level rise that will destroy the dig sites. Rather than evacuate, the archaeologists' fervor mounts when they discover a possible link between the ancient Quraquan civilization and the spacefaring race that created the monuments scattered throughout the galaxy: a portrait of the bird-headed creature depicted on Iapetus. The potential of a Rosetta Stone that would allow translation of the Monument-Makers' language is too great a lure and the scientists stay past their deadline, so they are still excavating the submerged Quraquan ruins in a bay when the nukes are "accidentally" launched by an overzealous sociopathic Caseway engineer in orbit. They manage to pull out an analog of a printing press, just as the tidal wave hits. Hutch guns her shuttle to escape the massive wall of water, but her boss, Richard, doesn't have time to get aboard, and he dangles from a winch line. By the time they finally get to high ground to escape the wave, hundreds of miles inland, Richard is dead.

Back on Earth, Hutch receives some mail for Richard from a peer digging on another world, Beta Pac, which reveals that there is a similar "discontinuity" in the Beta Pac civilization. Their civilization flourished until 16,000 years ago, then suddenly collapsed and they rebuilt to early space flight when they died out completely. Convinced that this is more than coincidence, Hutch convinces one of the Academy scientists, Carson, that there may be some significance to the pattern. They have a breakthrough when they use simulators to show the starfield as it would've appeared 16,000 years ago at the Monument in the Quraquan system. They find that one of the "buildings" points to a red star, and they cross-reference that with some of the Quraquan myths of a mythical destroyer creature called a "horgar." They spend some time looking for the star or constellation that would represent the hero that confronts the horgar. After narrowing it down, they use the radio telescope at Tsiolkovsky crater on Luna to see if there are any radio signals. They discover something broadcasting out of the plane of the ecliptic in a stellar system 4 light years away from Beta Pacifica.

They go to their colleagues some of the Academy scientists to form an expedition to investigate what is broadcasting the signal. Beta Pacifica is much further away from Earth than Quraqua, so the journey takes a long time, and they entertain themselves by acting out AI-written plays with personality and appearance modules that help them get into character. They come out of warp right on top of the object, which is a giant quasi-organic radio telescope. They are unable to stop fast enough and plow right through it, which damages the ship. They lose power in the main ship and take shelter in the shuttle, sending out a distress signal. The Caseway team is not far, because they were on the way to resupply the team on Beta Pac. Hutch and the archaeologists are rescued with poor grace, as they still resent the Caseway engineers for destroying the archaeological sites on Quraqua and killing their friend and companion. The Caseway team still has its original mission: to support the scientists on Beta Pac, so Hutch and the archaeologists go along.

Arriving at Beta Pac, the Caseway crew and Academy team discover that there is an ancient, primitive space station in orbit around the planet. The team splits up: some go down to the surface of Beta Pac to check out the dig there, while Hutch and some others investigate the satellite. Hutch and her companions board the orbital station and find giant aliens there - Beta Pac natives - whose bodies have been preserved for thousands of years because they were flash frozen and preserved in the vacuum of space. Apparently the aliens voluntarily vented the station to vacuum. Why?

Meanwhile, the others arrive on the planet's surface and can't find what happened to the previous team. They extend the range of their search then are caught by swarms of hostile carnivorous crabs, who caught them by surprise and unable to call for help because the first one to die was the pilot left to keep the engine running. Hutch flies down and is barely able to rescue any of them.

Having rescued a few of the scientists, Hutch and the others continue to brainstorm about all the clues they've found. They realize that the Monument-Makers created monuments to warn spacefaring civilizations in this galactic arm of a recurring existential threat that arrives every few thousand years and spreads in a destructive wavefront at sublight speeds. Extrapolating from the data they've translated, they calculate where that wavefront would be now, and then use their ship to go to a system to observe the phenomenon. They are convinced that the destructive force specifically targets buildings and other construction, so with a boxy shuttlecraft they carve a mesa on a rocky planetoid so that it is also rectilinear while the main ship investigates another planet. Then giant "clouds" appear in the system. One continues through without slowing, but the other senses their carving and turns to approach them. It zooms past the ship, which has to decelerate and turn around to follow it. The cloud arrives on the planetoid like a berserk hurricane, tearing the mesa apart while they desperately fly away, trying to put the body of the planetoid between them. But the cloud chases them and begins to tear at the shuttle. Instinctively, they land the shuttle and run for shelter on foot. Just as they get out of range, a giant fireball appears in the cloud and vaporizes the shuttle. Then the cloud pulls away and continues off through the system on its way through deep space.

The book ends with the realization that the "clouds" only target rectilinear objects, rolling across the void from the next spiral arm every 8,000 years. They still don't know what the clouds are, where they originated, or why they exist, but they realize that this creates a cycle of destruction for any civilization. They realize that the next wave is due to hit Earth in "only" 1000 years...which they hope will be enough time to prepare. (hide spoiler)] ...more

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Apr 14, 2009 Cindywho rated it liked it

Shelves: fantasy-sf

This was a perfectly serviceable space adventure with space travel, archaeology and monsters. The characters were a little thin, but the best part was that many of them were women, including the main character. It's nice to get an adventure story without it being uncomfortable because girls are barely allowed. ...more

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Mar 03, 2008 Luis Odicio rated it liked it · review of another edition

This was a book that fascinated and confused me at once. The last time I was into archaeological themes stories... I think it was the Indiana Jones movies.

Some of the terminology may be a bit deep, that and keeping track of quite a bit of dates, times and events.

However at the end it all comes together quite well. Don't get too attached to characters, because not all of them make it to the end of the book.

Since this is the first of a series, I will probably pick up the sequel after I read some b ...more

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