Jack McDevittAncient ShoresMonika says:
Farmer Tom Lasker and his son Will find something strange in one of their fields: a yacht in such perfect condition that it seemed to have been buried there only a short while ago. But who would do such a thing? The sensational news hits the media and soon the remote farm in North Dakota becomes a busy tourist attraction. Lasker considers taking the highest offer for the yacht just to get the reporters off his back. Things get even more confusing when it is discovered that the yacht was made from material that can’t be produced with present day technology. A friend of the Laskers, Max Collingswood, is convinced that if there’s a ship there must be a harbor and finds another artifact that poses even more questions for the scientists. More than 10 000 years ago when glaciers covered the North American continent big parts of North Dakota, Minnesota, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ontario were covered by one huge ice-age lake called Lake Agassiz after the Swiss geologist and naturalist Louis Agassiz. This now vanished lake is the scene of Jack McDevitt’s novel ANCIENT SHORES. The second artifact lets the question of who sailed Lake Agassiz in prehistoric times with a hypermodern yacht seem meaningless. McDevitt builds tension cleverly by revealing a part of the puzzle here and there without making it easy for the readers to piece them together. There isn’t much action and the flow of the narrative is quiet and full of small details that make you want to read on and find out what happens next. The showdown itself is less spectacular than might have been expected but not consistent with the ending most readers would have predicted. All in all a book worth reading with some surprising twists but no Indiana-Jones-style adventure. Not for action fans. |
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Last changes: 17-03-03 Copyright 2000 Christina Gross & Monika Hübner |
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